Fluid simulation

Hey guys, I’m very new to all this but I’m having a ball playing around with blender. I was trying to learn something about fluid simulation and I am having a hard time trying to get things to work. Can someone help me out with the inflow option. How could I get something like a tap happening? or a river, waterfall, that kind of thing. Any tips on how to make fizzy liquids? Also, while I’m picking your brains :slight_smile: could someone point me towards some good face and body tutorials? Thanks a ton!

OK, you want a tap running?

Firstly, start with the default scene - the cube, camera and lamp in the starting positions. Don’t worry too much about the lamp, you won’t really need it in my example.

  1. Switch to front view by pressing the 1 on the numpad.

  2. Scale the cube so it’s bigger and more space for us to work with. Not too large, just about 2 squares (blender units) out in all direction.

  3. Go to your physics panels by pressing the F7 button. (If you’re using blender 2.40, you have to press it twice and it’ll bring you to the physics button).

  4. Click on the Fluid Simulations Tab and click on “Enable”.

  5. This cube is going to be our domain where all the fluid will move in. Think of it as a fish tank, the water moving inside this tank does not get pass the glass barrier. So click on “Domain” and leave all the options as it is.

  6. Deselect everything now by pressing the “A” key on your keyboard.

  7. Go into top view and add a cylinder (you can experiment with different mesh later if you want). The cylinder will look fine once the liquid starts flowing. Accept the popup menu asking for number of vertices.

  8. Go back to front view and exit edit mode. Scale the cylinder down.

  9. Move the cylinder up a bit but not pass the cube boundary and set it there. When you move the cylinder up, you might want to constrain it to the Z-axis by pressing G (for grab/move) and then pressing Z (for Z-axis constrain).

  10. Assuming you’ve done everything mentioned above, your fluid simulation tab should still be there infront of you.

  11. With the cylinder selected, click on Enable > Inflow.

  12. Change the “Inflow velocity” in the Z direction to have a value of something like -0.5.

  13. Now select the domain mesh (the cube) and change the “Resolution: 50” to have a value of 32. This makes the computer render the fluid at low resolution - good for cpu speed and good for test renders. You can change it later to a higher resolution.

  14. At the bottom of that tab, there should be a Folder button where you specify the location of the output files. You can click on that and browse for the folder which you would like to put the output files in so later you can delete them if the fluid simulation turns out bad.

  15. After you’ve set the path for the output files, you can go into the F10 rendering menus and change the animation end frame (under the big RENDER button) to something like 50 frames?

  16. If all went well, you can return to the F7 fluid simulation tab for the domain object (the place in step 14) and click on the BAKE button. Let the baking finish.

  17. Now time to let the tap flow. Press 0 (zero) on the numpad to go into camera view. If you’re ready, press alt+a to preview the fluid simulation in the 3D work space after the baking is done.

Well, that’s it, you have yourself a tap. I hope I didn’t talk too much :wink:
You can further enhance the water by Set smoothing it and Subsurfing it, your choice. I don’t think subsurfacing is necessary here, I tried it and it doesn’t change much of the fluid. Other things you could add is like giving the fluid some transparency and reflection of the surrounding for it’s material setting.

Good luck :smiley:

Wolf

Thanks Wolf,

I did try pretty much the same thing at home last night, but maybe I missed something. I’ll go through it step-by-step when I get home later. Thanks a ton,

Hey everybody, another quick question. Now I have the tap running. How do I make it stop? For eg, I want to pour something into a glass, but I want it to stop when the glass is full. Stuff like that. Right now the glass fills up and then overflows. Which is nice, but not what I’d always like. Thanks a lot.

I think you can use IPO curves to control fluid flow, but not positive.

LetterRip