How was this done?!!
Jonstark
Posts: 2,738
So I was wandering around a bit in youtube, looking all the cool Carrara vids, when I came across this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RTxsGnqkB_0
Wow! Knocked me off my feet how awesome this was for a running water animation. I know from the notes it was done way back with Carrara 6 somehow with the particle emitter using metaballs, and once a long time back there was a tutorial but now the page is gone.
Anyone got any ideas how this could have been achieved?
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Comments
Yes.
Use a particle emitter
Set it to use Metaballs
Set up the proper settings and such to collide with objects and such
Try to start with something somewhat easy on calculations, and work your way up, once you catch the feel of how to make it work the way you want it to
Also give the metaballs a good water shader.
This would turn out much better as a rendered-to-video, but I made a GIF for use in the forums
Dart, that's cool! Can you share the particle setting you used? I haven't gotten anywhere close to that amount of fluidity on any of my attempts yet.
In the above example, I was simply demonstrating how to make and use animated brushes in Howler. So the cave system from Badlands wasn't in the render. Instead, I rendered the waterfall with alpha as a sequenced PNG. Then used the animated brush feature to simply paint the waterfall sequence onto a still image of the cave system.
'Twas a fun exercise ;)
I love the Carrara particles system! :ahhh:
Obviously, with more time setting this up, we could make it much less globby, and much, much more like water! :)
I did many tests to simulate brooks with particles metaballs, like Dart.
Calculations of simulations are impressive in time, espacialy with metaballs !
In this example which you show, I bet that it is created in realflow and has been imported in Carrara with the DCG Obj seq importer, it's much faster and realistic than in Carrara.
Carrara could do it, but it would take days to do that, and without to be shure of the final result. %-P
I always get lots of blobs going through planes, even with collide settings... so I gave up a while back.
Looking forward to the tut!
I really want to be able to make a waterfall, a river, and a landslide. I want to make a set of images depicting natural disasters (I live in an area that always has to be on alert for mudslides, landslides, floods, tsunami, typhoons, earthquakes and volcanoes - yep, you read that right). In short, lots of things that have flows involved. And shakes.
I also really would like some artist to come out with a scene showing before and after a disaster; I can find a few after the fact models, but none depicting before and after.
One of my (many) unfinished WIPs has a fish ladder in a stretch of stream. It would look really good with bubbling water in it (but I have to learn to finish one thing before rushing into something else...!)
Just checked RealFlow; looks nice, but it is out of my price range. I think I'll see what I can come with up in Carrara. Though I would love to have an animation, a couple of stills would do. I have a MacPro for a heavy hauling render machine so...
You will not make of old bones if you stays in this kind of area ! :ohh:
Realfow Learning Edition is only $99 (75 euros) and is for non-commercial use (hobbyist, etc.).
I do like the metaball based water, which definately would work well for some scene styles. For more realism, you could do fluid simulations in Blender (free) and export them as obj sequences or mdd to import into Carrara.
In the waterfall animation, my guess is that the whole thing is not done with metaball particles, just the fall itself. The water before and after the fall are probably done as simple water planes with animated textures. Nice effect though!
I was going to say that. There are a lot of artifacts that make the video look a bit smeared, but I think I can see the line between the falls and the stream.
Here a fast test of Realflow in Carrara.
The Carrara terrain was converted into mesches and imported in RF.
The importation in Carrara is carried out thanks to the plugin DCG Obj. Seq. Importer.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dLDK9Yj2RaA&feature=youtu.be
And another I've done a few weeks ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zz7Z88X9p1o
Just a follow up on this thread, I commented on the guys video giving him credit for one of the most excellent water simulations I've ever seen and he graciously responded, putting up a new link to the pdf tutorial on how it was done:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/sd483fzp6vuxmdi/WaterfallTutorial.pdf?dl=0
As others have guessed in this thread, the metaballs particles are only the part of the water spilling from the top and landing below. The bottom and top parts of the water are animated planes, the bottom one with some ripple functions. Fascinating stuff for anyone wanting to take a look. :)
I guess Phil and I called it!
Still, it is a neat effect and the tutorial is very well done, so thanks to the video's author to write up such a nice tutorial after all these years. Also, thanks for letting us know about it, Jon!
I showed this video last year on Carrarators and I just put this tuto today (with credit for you Daniel and of course, for Emily R.)
Thanks !
I promise I won't say that you can get a nicer water sim in Blender. I won't. I promise. Because it will upset everyone. And they'll think I'm a Blender fanatic or something. So I won't. Even if it's free, and quicker, and easier, with much better results. I just won't
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eNGZBv3ibFw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AUdbIv64KV8
I'm learning Realflow since a few time and I can see there that they are sleeping at DAZ.
The particles system of Carrara is really obsolete, as the physic engine !
yeah, Realflow has certainly evolved over many, many years to be incredible. Can't beat it for all kinds of fluid sims....
Now they're even focusing on the spray from breaking waves...beautiful stuff
But you can't expect Carrara to even come close to that stuff....Realflow has been in development for decades, just focusing on fluids. Gives you an idea of how incredibly difficult it is to come up with that stuff
No but C4D, Maya (and perhaps Blender) have a plugin to import these simulations.
The poor old Carrara can do some really good works, but it's so heavy for it ! %-P
And if you want to render your scene with water in Carrara, then just do the water part in Blender or some other specialized water sim, and composite the results into Carrara...
That's what I did with the video of the guy looking into the glass
For a simple lake or a see/ocean, Carrara is great thanks the texture room...
Joe, c'mon hook us up with a tut! Just a simple step by step of how to do the sim in blender then import into Carrara, sounds like that would be simplest/best solution.
There's a TON of video tutorials out there to do fluid sims in Blender....try Blender guru or just search Youtube or whatever. It really is fairly quick and painless if you know the basic concepts...
As far as bringing that into Carrara, the problem is the mesh it generates will choke Carrara when you bring it in as an OBJ. So IMO your best bet is to render the sim part in Blender and composite with your Carrara render.
You may be able to use MDD to import, but I can't recall if anyone was successful with that...
DOOHHH !!!!
I just remembered that since the fluid sim generates new mesh constantly, and the poly count is always changing, MDD won't work.
I think compositing is your best bet. As it usually is... :) :) :)
Ah compositing sounds like the best option now that you mention it :) I was scanning some blender fluid sims over at youtube, they do look pretty decent. Are all fluid sims based on metaballs? I haven't pried into it but just scanning all the various youtube fluid sims they all look like they might be meta ball based (though my eyes could be deceiving me)
I'm not even close to an expert on fluid sims, but I'm fairly certain the answer is a firm NO. Metaballs were never designed to simulate water and other fluid-y fluids. They're okay for blobs, but that's about it.
True fluid sims are a world apart.
And BTW, I don't want to come across as bashing Carrara, just giving a bit of background about the issue. I'm sure metaballs have their uses for some, and if it serves your purpose then it's awesome.
But I think many view metaballs as a fairly obsolete and limited technology. My very simple categorization of metaballs was that they were developed as a rendering trick/method to simulate blobby stuff. Basically, you tell the renderer where each point of the blobs is in 3D space, and it renders a blobbiness around each point. And if the points are a certain distance apart, it modifies the render and builds like a bridge between the point/blobs.
There's really no polygonal mesh defining the blobs. That's not to say there isn't a metaball modelling feature where you can generate metaball type meshes...
Anyway, with true fluid sims being developed decades ago, metaballs are, in the view of many, pretty obsolete. True fluid sims generate huge and detailed meshes that act under some very complicated fluid equations.
On the other hand metaballs are fast and easy, so if they work for what you're doing they're probably the best solution. I'm just giving a little insight and background into what they are. Although I'm certainly not a meatball expert. :) :) :)