Hi! Can anyone give me some advice on how to create a good lava material. Finding a good texture isn’t enough since I want the lava to be flowing down from the slopes of a volcano and over a field in different directions, and that makes it tricky to get the UVs to stretch in the right direction.
I’ve been thinking of perhaps changing to BI to get a more cartoony or illustration like render so suggestions for BI may be useful. Photo realism is not the goal but something that looks good and can be used for printed board game graphics.
In the final version the fluid resolution will be much higher (less flickering on the borders) and much slower.
Of course i will add additional secondary effects like smoke, sparks, heat distortion and so on.
so it is fluid sim - two fluids are mixed during that. Render from top, use as texture; have good hardware and a lot of RAM for the actual simulation.
Yes, I read that blog post but it doesn’t really tell me how he did it. I realize it’s done by fluid simulation but are you saying he mixes two different materials in the fluid sim? Everything I’ve read on that topic says it can’t be done since every fluid simulation can only have one domain object, but perhaps there are ways to go around that?
I’m not sure what you mean by “Render from top, use as texture”. Should I create my own texture based on a top-render of the fluid simulation and apply it to my fluid domain for the final render?
Confused. Yes, fluid is one domain/color. Smoke, however, can be several: http://blenderdiplom.com/en/tutorials/all-tutorials/326-smoke-colors.html
Then there are particles as a fluid- they can be mixed but it smells burning PC due to amount needed…
Video looks like smoke/fire yet it says “In the final version the fluid resolution will be much higher” and speaks smoke sim deficiencies before that.
You said “cycles and only still render” which assumes texture as i understand; render simulation (whichever that would be) and use as your texture then.
So this route is still open for experimentation probably.
I think fluid sim with particles may be the best way to achieve what I want. But this behave strangely when I try to boost the tracer count. If I keep it under 500 I can see them but if I go beyond that only a few particles (2 or 3) are generated or nothing at all. I need way more than 500 to make it look good.
EDIT: It seems like I can get a higher number of particles by leaving the “tracer” count on 500 and instead increasing the “generate” count. It still behaves a bit unexpectedly though. Increasing it to 2 makes a big difference, but after that the changes are less clear.
Tbh, i have never done this - it requires tons of RAM and is slow as your_term_here on my 2 (medi)core CPU. It’s a pity author can’t be reached and no news on that, would have been interesting what did he use.
Just a little update. I couldn’t get particles to work with the fluid sim. And after spending lots of time trying to create a material which had the two layers of dark and bright lava that you normally see on photos I finally gave up. This render just uses a simple diffuse shader. I added the glow effect and the fire/smoke cloud in photoshop. I’m not really pleased with it but it works for now. I’m still interested in getting a good lava material though.