Hi! I’m trying to make a fountain using mantoflow simulation, but I’m unable to find setup that looks somehow realistic.
My goal is something similar to this.
Did anyone make something similar and could help me?
I tried multiple inflow object shapes, animating rotation and animating displacement, but nothing looked right.
Should I gust give up on the sim and try making a fake water material for the cube?
First thing I would do is to make sure to activate the “fractionnal obstacles” setting. That will help the simulation treat obstacles with better precision.
Then, It seems your mesh generation settings on the fluid domain could be improved. The mesh has low detail compared with the simulation, so I will guess that you used the default meshing values. Try setting the “upres factor” to 3 to better capture the detail of the simulation in the mesh.
Then, still in the mesh tab, adust the particle radius. I recommend 1.5 instead of the default 2, as that will allow smaller droplets and finer details. Also, activate “use speed vectors”: that will allow the fluid to have motion blur, which is very important for water to look realistic.
Then, let’s talk render settings. For realism, use Cycles. You will want to use a decently high number of glossy and transparent bounces. Set both of them to 16 or more (don’t forget to set the “total” number to something that matches). Then, make sure both refractive and reflective caustics are on. Set “filter glossy” to 0.5 and set indirect clamping to 50 instead of the default 10. These settings will be a bit noisier than the defaults, but they will make your lighting closer to the realistic physics of light, which helps when dealing with the complex reflections of water. Also, activate motion blur.
Finally, the water material. You will probably need the glass material shadow trick:
This will allow more light to make its way through the material. When calculating shadows, Cycles will use the transparent shader instead of the glass. Also, if you want to color the water in a realistic way, that is done with a volume shader. If you try changing the surface color of a glass material, it will react like its surface is painted, but colored water actually has the color spread through the volume of the material.
