Splash effect.blend (3.67 MB)
Splash effect of, perhaps, water drops on the floor?
For that you’d have to use more particles and play with the fluid settings in the particles tab, instead of subdividing the resulting mesh.
Guess what I just did in the Splash effect above? 
fluid particles composited with noise to disturb the edges
This is cool, there are many things for texturing this could be used for, even making brushes 
Oh yeah, I hadn’t thought of that.I just needed a new transition for the title sequence I ma building for work. It’s about drought, naturally I have a voroni texture in the background, but I wanted some water drips to reveal the foreground.
GREAT sketchbook, I really enjoy it
love your experiments with fake data vis :)) very nice stuff, lots of useful tricks and ideas
keep posting 
I needed to create an animation of falling pills for a work assignment, as the drug in question was to expensive to film. So I knocked up a hard body simulation with dupli objects and cached them falling to a table (transparent so I could shoot from below). I found that I had to enclose the simulation as the pills would scatter everywhere!
After that success i decided to value add the work by constructing a biology illustration of the drug in effect. After downloading the actual HIV cell from Autopack http://www.autopack.org/news/autopackforblenderreleased I decided that the geometry that resulted was far to dense for this simple explainer video. So I created basic geometry that was inspired by source data. I tried to use the chemical structure of the drug to represent it’s molecule too.
After the initial success of rendering the pill fall in cycles i tried the same for the bio animation, alas the render times skyrocketed due to my desire for extreme shallow DOF effects and volumetric lighting. In fact the pill drop animation was quite noisy but I could clean it up with some blurring. In the bio animation any blurs for noise reduction resulted in patchy looking blobs instead of smooth areas.
After rendering the same animation from different angles I had a total of 20 seconds of video, taking about 4-5 hours render time. But I had to restart a few times after testing the playback, checking for the appearance of the particles and SSS effects.
Fun fact, the first bio shot of the inside of a blood vessel has a cool wobble. I made a simple tube with a bend in it and applied a soft body effect to it. This resulted in a gentle pulsing effect. However the blood platelets tended not to respect the walls of the tube properly. They are a particle emission following a curve path that spirals down the centre of the tube. All the particles have self collision turned on.
Finally I applied to much shallow DOF to the image and killed the cool material on the HIV (green) cells. I used an image of bare tree branches mapped to the NOR and EMIT value of the texture.
EDIT:
Oh I almost forgot that the last scene, of the RNA strand being transcripted into a DNA helix was a problem. I wanted to use the same mesh motion for both but the RNA was a just the same base mesh of 1 side of a ladder. After it goes through the transcription molecule it appears as a DNA helix. But I didn’t want to render the scene twice with a mask between them and the lighting would have impacted on each side anyway.
My solution was to duplicate the geometry, once without the mirror modifier and twist (RNA side) and then WITH the mirror and twist modifier (DNA side). I then added a transparency texture (a linear ramp blend) that could be flipped for each object. So one disappeared at the centre of the transcription molecule while the other object appears at the same point. Note that the image here shows only the DNA strand as it obscures the RNA single strand, the effect only works in rendered view.
Ha ha, I just noticed while downloading my HIV .blend files that my browser said “Checking for viruses”
Nice work!
That is a really awesome example of real world problem solving, and I’m laughing at the ‘checking for viruses’ bit 
Here’s a couple effect tests with demonstrations of technique.
and a map trace effect:
Lord Odin would approve 
Those glorious cubes! Nice effects there, David.
I concur that it looks pretty, perhaps some SSS could be applied to the smoke cubes for more of a pyroclastic effect.
Also on the paint splat, metaballs should be a lot quicker to work with in version 2.75 due to an optimization (up to 10x and potentially a lot more, but it’s still going to become slow once your simulation gets into the thousands in terms of metaball count).
Hey I didn’t know that metaballs was getting some love! Thanks Ace.
Some fake particle streaks. Just UV mapped plane with modifiers>Subsurf>Array>Fit Curve on a knot curve.
Attachments
swishy line-1312.blend (749 KB)
Fake Interstellar BlackHole (like theirs was any more real!).
Made with Freestyle strokes! And some textures… here’s the .blend
Attachments
Interstellar Freestle.blend (567 KB)
A simple cube with modifiers. And a sphere with a volume material to obscure the far side of the cube particles. I have added a couple textures to modify the compositing of sun rays node and add some digital glitter to the background.
The demo video was edited in Blender using the VSE, even the music was cut up in the VSE. Although after altering the tempo of the groove beat (with pitch) I notice that the waveform doesn’t display the result. That is a longer clip with stretched waveform.
Attachments
hex sphere.blend (2.79 MB)
Very cools stuff there, I like the combination of the rays and the build modifier too