Hi, is there any solution out there to surface the fluid particles? I know at one point I saw a video from fartharsy showing this… but I don’t know what happened to this functionality.
Bump, because I REALLY need this… It has to be transparent because it’s water.
irc farsthary visualized them with metaballs and thats the only way atm. try a high particle count and a reeeeaaaallly fast pc, maybe the quality is enough
Nah, if you look closely at his screenshots, he has an extra particle display option “surface” (as opposed to “halo”, “object”, “group”, etc…).
I’ve tried doing the metaballs method, but I’m literally dealing with 500k + particles, and I’ve got plenty of computing power (i7 960, 12GB DDR3 1333) But they don’t render for some reason… (still investigating). Perhaps because I’m not displaying the metaballs in the viewport, Blender isn’t calculating them… but geeze I really don’t want to have that crap going on in the viewport… :spin: I guess if I have no choice…
i see he made something like a surfacing prototype: http://farsthary.wordpress.com/2010/01/28/a-step-closer-to-particle-surfaces/ but as he writes in that blog post it wasn’t working very well.
for what do you need fluid particles with a surface? maybe you can get around using particles or a mesh surface?
Yea I’m thinking I may just have to bite the bullet and go with metaballs.
It’s a vfx shot where a large tentacle comes out of a fountain and of course with that a bunch of water gets flung around. I’ll be sure to post up the final results here. 
Well nuts… using meta balls just locked up my computer… so I guess that’s a no-go.
Any other suggestions for how I can create a surface over these particles?
another idea would be to use 3delight. Afaik it can directly render particles as meta balls. Unfortunately my exporter is still buggy and there is no access to the extra primitive command that defines its render type but with a bit of hacking you could get that working