Help with metaballs

Support Basics & Interface
#1

I’m trying to use metaballs to animate a drip effect, but am having some issues:

I start with a conglomeration of about 5 balls from which I want to animate 2 or 3 drops falling. But when I animate the falling metaball, after a certain distance it disappears, along with the rest of the metaball group.

Does anyone know how to manage this problem?

#2

So you decided not to supply a blend file to make it more difficult for others to check it out.

#3

Sorry Richard, I just thought it might be something obvious since I’m new to metaballs, and It’s always a bit tricky since I’m using linked assets.

Here goes:

So in this example the metaballs disappear at frame 36.

And regarding the scale, I tried scaling the balls down in edit mode and they disappear before I get them to the right size, likewise if I apply scale in object mode they disappear.

Looking forward to any ideas. Thanks for reading.

MetaballTest.blend (1.28 MB)

#4

So metaballs interact with each other, the dimensions of your metaballs are ~2mm so at ~8cm distance they will cease to exist.
So my advise is to scale them up at least 1cm.

#5

Thanks @ramboblender. The problem is that they have to fit into the scale of my scene, where everything else is real-world scale.

I might try pushing them another mm or two to see if that gets me enough distance. But I take it there’s no way to control the distance they can cover?

Edit: I’ve increased the size somewhat, and still believable enough for my scene—works OK now. Cheers. Still might be good if the range was somehow controllable… But calling it solved for now.