A sort of fountain of purple goo.
It’s a meta plane with a particle emitter under it shooting meta spheres.
The material uses the Fresnel diffuse and WardIso specular shaders, with a bit of ray reflection and some kind of cloud normal map. Honestly I don’t remember all the details because Blender crashed sometime after rendering (overnight) and I didn’t save the .blend.
i liked, odd that you lost it, but im sure you can do it again if needed :).
That would be a cool replacement for water splashes in a puddle (with work on the wateryness obviously). Quicker than a fluid sim? I haven’t used meta objects at all (I’m a subd guy), so do you just parent the particle meta object?
cool, great work. good old fasioned tricks and cheats usually work just as good as computer sims.
@david:
yes, much quicker than a sim… in fact, almost realtime.
you just parent the metaball to the emitter, then turn on dupliverts in the emitter.
hey jessethemid, I just tried that but couldn’t get the seperate meta ball to be conected to the meta plane for particle emission.
I don’t understand Meta creation at all. When I made a ball it became a part of the plane allowing it them to interact with each other (good) but I couldn’t select just the ball to parent to the emitter (bad). If I duplicate the ball (it will parent correctly) it becomes a seperate object and doesn’t interact in that cool oozy way with the meta plane?
What am I doing wrong?
I’m no expert with meta objects either, but when you create a meta object, you start out in Edit mode like any other object, so if you just add another meta from there, you are just adding pieces to a single object–when you get out of edit mode, you will select the whole thing as a unit.
You have to make your particle object as a separate object, in Object mode. Then you can parent the emitter to it.
I’m not sure exactly how to make sure the meta plane and the meta spheres interact, but it seems like this:
In order for a new meta object to interact with an existing one, you have to have the old one selected in object mode when you create the new one.
Looking at other threads it seems that meta objects interact based on their grouping. They are grouped by name
This of course extends to the dupliverted versions of Metaball.2 in a particle emission. When I copied Metaball.2 I renamed it (a habit of mine) and didn’t realise that I was removing it from the group!
I also found that I had to increase the Meta resolution quite a bit to get good interaction with the Metaplane but found that the redraw (realtime) failed to update corectly in the preview pane.