I am having a bit of a problem with fluids. I have a simple simulation set up, an obstruction, a fluid and a domain. I have set this up several times, and had it working. However, if I modify the fluid, say by scaling it down, then select the domain and click on “Bake”, after a couple of seconds, the domain dissapears, and no action is shown when using Alt-A. The fluid doesn’t render either, only the obstruction renders.
I have cleaned out the tmop directory where previous renders have been created, and deleted the fluidsdata directory to avoid any conflicts. Has anybody else seen this?
The domain probably disappears because it becomes the fluid. Fluid simulation doesn’t happen instantly, it can take a long time (for my little tests, not too long, though - perhaps < 10 minutes) to simulate. If it is a complecated simulation, or high resolution (or large?) it can take longer. So, are you letting Blender finish the simulation?
Yes, I am letting it finish. When I first run the simulation, everything is fine. I run into the problem when I scale down the fluid mesh. Thats what has me wondering if there is some kind of scale limitation. Or perhaps a scale limitation between the domain and the fluid mesh.
What I am trying to do, is animate a single drop of water falling. I think I will try scaling other objects up and see if that works any better.
First of all, make sure the liquid is an ICO sphere. I know other objects work, but I have been told that an ico sphere works better than others, and it seems to work for me.
Next make sure that the ico sphere is a decent size and that the domian isnt too big. I find that when I increase the domain over a cirtain size, nothing happens in the simulation. Try a decent sized ico sphere at first as well, then try different size sphere/domain to see what you can get away with.
Maybe when you create the sphere, give it more verticies (I cant remember what the prompt asks for, but up the number asked when the sphere is created). But only do this if it doesnt work with the defaults.
Also leave the domain on defaults until you get it working, then see what you can get away with changing, I just got it going, and then experimented.
Let me know how you go with these settings anyhow.
I also found that if I (for the most part) leave the fluid and domain alone, I can scale the obstacles all I want to achieve the effect I am going for.
Yeh, thats true. The cvs version of blender has some great updates to the fluid sim (like having a 10m domain, instead of a max of 1), but of course, the simulation times are still huge for a really detailed sim.
Another thing I have tried that seems to help, is to scale and transform having both the domain and the fluid mesh selected. Blender doesn’t seem to care too much about the location or scale of the obstacles. as long as some portion of the surface of interest lies in the domain. In my case, trying to model a single, drop this works rather well.
I have not yet tried to scale in edit mode, I will have to give it a try.