Water drops in Blender... (update on page 2)

Thanks for all the comments, haven’t checked this thread for a while… I am still fiddling with yafray, although I’ never heard of adjusting a lamp’s spec value…

Here’s an update with some pieces of ice… It’s still blender, but I think it’s getting better…

http://www.hagenmedia.de/images/finewater.jpg

P.S.:Thanks for your PM, Modron, I’ll try that.

whats this for agian?

It looks more like you just blasted the T1000 with a grenade launcher. If you were trying to go for that effect…I’d give you a huge round of applause.

yes, sorry i forgot to comment on how much i liked it, i really do.

it doesnt quite look like water though as desoto said, but it really does look almost like something from T2

i like this much better than the first.

like desoto said, it still looks like liquid metal though.

don’t know much about yafray, but maybe you could try POV-Ray photon mapping. That might be a bit of the hassle but from some pics i’ve seen the results are pretty nice (caustics etc)

whoa!!! nico that one is awesome, even though it’s still don’t look like water, but it reminds me of terminator 2.

ps: the key for real water is “REFRACTION” which you can acvhiev only with some raytracing.

Cool!, I like the looks of your latest pic. Not water but better :slight_smile:

I think you need more in your environment to reflect, probably a distinctly different colour than the surface that the water drops sit on. And broken shapes to give definition. I think you also need to reduce the amount of colour your env map is applying to the drop.

I have done a water drop on a leaf. The drop had a lot of transparency in it’s base material and an env map with the images of other leaves silloetted against a sky. That map only applied some of it’s colour to the material to allow the leaf surface underneath to show through. When I get home, I’ll have another look and see if it looks better than that.

don’t know if this helps or not or if you’d be willing to go through the hassle of exporting to POV-Ray (or Yafray) but i think that would be the best bet for refraction. I just tried photon mapping in POV-ray really quickly (this is my first try :stuck_out_tongue: ), you could probably tweak it for better results. These were done entirely in POV-Ray but you could export the meshes and then tweak the materials settings. Maybe this is remotely similar to what you are going for?

this is a smooth sphere (i know it looks more like glass than water) red sphere just to show its refracting.

http://reblended.com/www/zdk1/misc/photontest1.JPG

and an ugly bumpmap just to show the effect.

http://reblended.com/www/zdk1/misc/photontest2.JPG

if exporting is a problem, i guess you can get the metaball effect using POV’s glob (or something like that) feature. Don’t know exactly how time your willing to put into this as its going to be a bit tedious.

can’t compare POV to Yaf because i know nothing about Yaf but i think POV is good. povray.org if you don’t have it.

um hope that helps and that i made myself clear, if i didn’t just yell at me or something ;). If you already knew all this I apologize.

While an improvement over the first picture posted, I have to agree with the other posters and say that the look is more one of molten metal. It probably has a lot to do with the environment, but also with the way the droplets are presented. It looks to me that the implied surface tension is to great for water. Take glass of water, find flat surface, pour out glass, study result. I would think that the water beads would be smaller and that there would be more coalescing (?) of droplets (more puddles)
Maybe a reference object in the frame to see the relative size of the droplets would help. Keep us in the loop!

BTW, zdk1, I love the bump-mapped water object. It really looks like water !!

the surface tension is ok 72.3 mN/m
and it is also ok to use hight contact angles to suggest the droplets
lie on the waxy skin of a fruit.

no i think the metallic look comes from to much reflection
take a white plate rinse it with pure water till no detergent is left
rub i dry an place a drop on it.

you will hardly see it

most of the effects are caused by reftaction and not by reflection

caustics: the ground below the drop is darkened around the drop
and light intesity is focussed to the center.
BM

looked at it once more

some physics:
if you have water on a lotus like surface drops will always be circle shaped
when seen from the top. if you have a small and a big drop in contact the small one will blow up the big one until itself is gone. the only reason to stay would be it is somehow stuck to the ground but then the contact angle would be around 90 degrees or even less.

BM

lol this is a little OT but…

just wanted to say thanks alot nico!
reading this had led me back to POV-ray to try out photons and caustics and i’m having so much fun experimenting with it now :smiley: (despite the exponentially increased render times as a result of using photons with area lights %| ).

are you still working on this project? Good luck with it :slight_smile:

I just wanted to say thanks and nice work :slight_smile:

i’m currently bussy with a contest that has the topic frozen worlds
so i needed a ice shader. and your work realy showed me how to pull it off :slight_smile:

this was the result of the ice shader. not as good as yours, but i’m still tuning it :slight_smile:

http://217.172.174.210/~erik/3d/ice-wip.jpg

I must say that the second pic you’ve updated looks damn good, not like water tough. More like liquid silver.

yes. great looking second picture.
but, nowhere near water :frowning:

liquid silver came to my mind too. the olde terminator thing…

.b

Ok, here is my attempt at it. http://users.tpg.com.au/kinga1/stuff/waterdrops.jpg

just on a side note, this is the first time I pressed the Unified Renderer button. Seems to deepen the normal mapping or something. Can someone point me to a tut that explains what it does?

:smiley: both are awesome !

but i think nico´s one is more ice-looking, tell us your settings :stuck_out_tongue: !

btw: tuhopuu has IOR, and i think you can fake refraction with it (or not?) . this refraction-fake-texture-plugin uses it.

bye nastacc

part of the problem with nico’s last pic is the surface tension that somebody else commented on. Water does not bead with an underhang (does that make sense?) but mercury does (i think I tested the water, I didnt’ test the mercury ;p)

Nico, try raising the surface under the drops untill the centreline of the curve of each drop rests on or just under the surface. That will remove the underhang and they should look better.