Filling the bowl - Or how to start with the cup half full

So, after the help I had modelling my cup/crucible, the next step is using fluid dynamics. The core question is: How do I start the bowl half full?

All the tutorials and posts I read, talk about filling something from an inflow, or dropping fluids into stuff. But what I want is to have the cup half full or so at the start of my animation and work from there. The attached video shows what I want is achieved somewhat halfway through. But how do I get that state to be present in frame 1?

Do I bake it and then work from say, frame 120 or so for the rest of the clip? Is there something else?

FillingTheBowl.blend (914 KB)

Edit: Link back to the modelling thread: https://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?446249-How-am-I-going-to-rid-of-this-sharp-edge&p=3287951#post3287951

Okay, messed around some more. So, the ball enters the cup and the fluid leaks out from under it. The cup is an obstacle the ball as well. How come it can push fluid out through it?

Edit: Hmm, could it be because I hadn’t applied the subsurf yet?

Are you trying to get the balls to interact with the fluid or are you just happy having the ball go into the fluid? If the latter I would just double check that your domain is just inside the mesh at the bottom of the cup and not out past it as the fluid will only interact with the domain area. So if you do the domain box have the bottom of the domain box about mid way between the bottom verts of the exterior of the cup and the interior verts of the cup. Also you can have a solid object in the shape of the interior of the cup that fills to the depth you want the fluid and place it in the cup to the size where it is closest to the interior of the cup and set it to fluid then bake the sim again and once it is baked you can move that object outside of the rendered layers as it is no longer needed just don’t delete it in case you need to adjust it some more.

Another tip is once the sim is baked you can now adjust the domain size to adjust for any portion of the simulation that is showing outside the mesh and it will still play as it did after the bake. Simulations are not always an exact science and need some fiddling around with to make them work and look right. You can also apply a subdivision surface modifier to the simulation after the baking process to help smooth out the liquid more without having to raise the final resolution.

So essentially you will have three parts to the simulation as follows, the domain cube set to size and physics set to fluid domain, the cup physics set to fluid partial slip, and the fluid object in the cup physics set to fluid.

Well, I’d like the balls to interact. The idea is, the ball is dipped in paint, then changes color. The color change and movement has been done now. Also, I fixed the ‘leak’, seems like the subsurf needed to be applied. I am running into the ball interacting, doesn’t look like much interaction is actually happening.