Awesome Waterfall Yumminess

JoeMamma2000

I was doing some stuff in Blender last night, and finally remembered to try something I’d wanted to do for a long time but just never got around to it….

I’ve always wanted to use the Blender fluid sim to generate a nice looking waterfall, export to Carrara, and render, and see how the process is and whether it’s easy and do-able.

Now if anyone has ever used the Blender fluid sim you know how easy it is to set up a basic sim and get results. You just add a big cube for the domain, add a second object for the “inflow” device to pump the fluid into the domain, tweak a few settings, and hit the simulator button. Super easy, and relatively quick.

So I did all that, then slid along the timeline until I got a nice frame of animation, and exported the fluid object in OBJ format, then imported into Carrara. It gave me a nice looking waterfall, with about 850k polygons which, surprisingly, Carrara handles fairly easily. The OBJ file was about 30 MB.

So I threw a quick scene together, added a Realistic Sky and sunlight, a couple other highlight/bounce lights, used the stock water shaders in Carrara (well, with minor tweaks) and hit Render. And the results were pretty nice. Took about 15 minutes to render because of all the water refractions and reflections, though there was no GI, just a few straight lights.

The last image is after I created more turbulence for a wilder, more splashy, almost cartoony effect. Just added a simple sphere obstacle in front of the inflow device to cause a lot more turbulence.

Honestly, the fastest part of it all was the Blender fluid sim, and the rest of it was a lot of shader and light tweaks and test renders and more tweaks. And the biggest pain was trying to UV map the brick walls in Carrara, which I finally gave up on and did in Hex.

Anyway, folks might want to consider getting comfortable with features like this in other software. In this case you can fairly quickly make a very nice looking fluid object, and keep it in your library of stock objects that can be re-used over and over whenever needed. And I think that it’s at least comparable to the results you can achieve using Carrara’s features...meatballs?..... :) .

Headwax

looks good Joe, thanks for the heads up on the method.

richard.chaos_91798ec102

Can you animate it? If so post one on YOUTUBE for us

PS DOnt forget the sounds

evilproducer

Even if you can't animate the fluid sim, but just a single state, if it's the sheet of water you could come up with an animated shader perhaps.

I suppose you could also lower the polygon count as well.

WendyLuvsCatz

would the new obj sequence importer work? (I still have not bought it)

JoeMamma2000

Yes, of course you can animate it. Since it's a fluid sim it, by definition, gives you an animated simulation.

Now, can you animate and render it in Carrara? If you import it as an OBJ sequence I'm guessing it will make Carrara freeze since the poly counts are so huge. Even with one OBJ Carrara is slow. Heck, Hexagon crashes just trying to load one of the 850k OBJ files from one frame of the sim.

Personally, what I'd do is to use an extremely powerful tool called "compositing". You simulate and render the fluid in Blender, then composite that layer together with whatever elements/layers you want from Carrara or other applications. Blender has a built-in compositor which might make that fairly easy, or you'd use AE or whatever.

In the real world compositing is probably the most important (and fun, IMO) and widely used part of generating visual effects, and is used in virtually every motion picture you see.

So yeah, you might be able to force the simulation results into Carrara somehow, but it hardly seems worth it when compositing is so much more flexible and efficient. Especially in an outdoor scene where lighting is so simple.

JoeMamma2000

FWIW, here's a very quick and nasty (and short) animation from Blender of the same waterfall fluid sim that I exported the single frame from. Just add some water shaders, (and maybe stretch the domain and add an outflow.... :) .....), and you can composite this in with any animation from any other application.

http://youtu.be/AUdbIv64KV8

WendyLuvsCatz

some silly keyframed metaball action