Water droplets on glass

Support Modeling
1

Hi everyone,

I’m wondering which is the best way to tackle the next step in my current project…

The current scene is an angled sheet of glass with a squeegee being pulled downwards.

The next step in the project is to add water to the glass sheet, except in the area where the squeegee has already passed over.

What is the best way to tackle this? With the fluid simulation features?
Or by using a script such as the ‘Scatter and Drop’ script I’ve seen here:
http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=41158

I am a noob but I’m quite happy to do the research and learn what’s necessary, I just need a point in the right direction!

Any help would be appreciated.
Cheers.

2

Although I don’t know a lot about fluid sim, I think that it’s probably the best way to go… But you’re probably going to spend a lot of time waiting for it to bake (and then render), so I would definably do some research on the settings first. It will probably have to be pretty high-quality to simulate the thin film on top of glass being wiped off.

Maybe you could just separate the glass into lots of little pieces and then play with the refraction value?

3

I have tried manually adding water droplets (below), but the result is not really up to scratch. I think what is needed are some realistic water dribbles down the glass rather than just drops scattered about.

Any other thoughts guys?

http://www.nexuswebmedia.net/beta/v14wd.jpg

4

How realistic do you want to go? The image certainly reads as water being squeegeed off of glass, even though the drops look somewhat toony.

5

Thanks for your comments Orinoco.

The image forms part of some vehicle sign writing so it doesn’t have to be photo realistic so long as the idea is conveyed convincingly.

I think I’ll pursue the manual method of modeling the water drops as I’ve done so far. In my view they are all a bit too uniform in shape, and maybe add a few dribbles in there and see how it turns out.