You can check the animation here: https://www.instagram.com/p/CuRKLW3NR7E/
Vegetation is almost impossible to render out without noise and flicker, unless you up the sample count to unreasonable amounts. You probably know that “blender flicker” with vegetation, that comes from the Blender internal denoiser denoising frame by frame and not looking at multiple frames at once. The workflow is: final render without Blender denoise > 750 samples > multi image Neat Denoiser on the final animation in after effects > Topaz Labs AI denoise > Lumetri Color sharpening in after effects. A LOT of processing and still far from perfect, but at least with this workflow the flicker is not that visible anymore. I think that’s the worst. You can get a less pronounced flicker by not utilizing the translucency channel for the vegetation, but then it will look incredibly fake, which is not ideal either.
The drip simulation and animation was done with the paid Flip Fluids addon for Blender. I think this is one of those addons that’s a must have for Blender, if you want to do production value fluid sims with efficient workflow. The only problem is that it’s really hard to find any good tutorials on how it works and how to use it, but luckily it’s really easy to jump in and figure it out yourself.
What do you think? If you have a better workflow please don’t hesitate to share!
