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Creating Liquid Flowing Animation

Posted By neoco1 7 Years Ago
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neoco1
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Hi.
I want to create a slimy, jelly looking liquid coming out from a tap. 
I couldn't decide which way should i do this ?

Can i make it with iClone ? With morph creator maybe ? 

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If you only see the liquid out of the tap but not the recipient then you can probably resort to morph animation indeed and obtain quite good result with a bit of elbow grease.

Anything more complex than that, it will be difficult as iClone itself does not provide a fluid simulation engine despite the fact it uses the PhysX engine from NVidia which is able to do fluid simulation. This is simply not exposed to iClone yet (ever ? We don't know).

You may be able to simulate certain fluid effects through particles (PopcornFX) but that would work mostly for rain, spray, foam, things like that, but I'm afraid not to simulate actual liquids flowing over objects, perhaps drops but that's it.

If you really need actual fluid simulation then you will have to use DCC tools such as Blender, Maya, Houdini, etc.. or even Realflow (but in this case Houdini would be a better choice anyway).

But then is the problem to import the result of the simulation into iClone as it does not support yet (ever ? We don't know) Alembic file import..
In any case, not an easy task.


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Delerna
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Delerna
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This is just an expression of my opinion but I have been a software developer for about 40 years and the most important thing I have personally learnt is to never say something can't be done because I don't have the most advanced tools. So I am doing some experiments now to see if it really is possible to do liquid flowin iClone with the capabilities that it has. I think it is.

Anyway here is my step 1 in the video at the bottom.
I spent just under 2 hours creating the models in Blender, exporting them individually as OBJ files, converting the primary OBJ files to iclone props, loading them into iClone, adding the extra OBJ files to the primary iClone props to convert them to morph animatable props, Animating this scene, exporting its video from iclone, uploading the video to uTube and creating this post on the forum.

This is quite basic because I wanted to see if my idea had potential. Now I am going to improve the shapes of the models, improve the shape of the water splashes create animatable textures for the water so the water looks to flow better. I am also going to look into seeing if the idea I have for letting a character put his hands into the water pull some water out to wash his face and let the water fall from his hands and face back into the sink
 I am also going to work on creating the jelly liquid flow from a bottle into a container and see if I can animate a character making something from the jelly liquid with his hands.

I will post those other steps and indicate how long it took.
I can't compare it with how easy or quick it would be with PhysX water flow capabilities because I have never used it. But iClone does not have it and so far I am finding that using morph animations for this is not that difficult and doesn't take too much time....Only stating my opinion. Others may or may not think the same and that is fine.





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Hi!

The way I considered uses Movie as DisplacementMap.
This is easy, but maybe it's difficult to get a good result.

https://forum.reallusion.com/uploads/images/9da93f75-2065-40e3-b8a0-0260.jpg
Delerna
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Spent yesterday in my old home town visiting mother and friends so couldn't do anything on this.

With reguards to displacement mapping, yes that is one of my considerations for what I am working on although I am not sure whether it will work with morph animatable props yet.
Here is my second step.
I totally rebuilt the sink and made improved morph props.
This took me 8 hours although I had to create the morph props twice because after doing them the first time I got what I think are better ideas on how to design them.
That's another thing I strongly suggest. If you have an idea and your not sure whether it is a good way or not then just give a go anyway. Its amazing how much you learn and improve based of ideas that you try out on, even if the initial ideas don't work. I certainly find suggestions from other people can be very helpful. But I also think trying your own ideas is a great way to learn. Who knows, you might even discover something no one else has thought of?








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Delerna
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Oh and another thing I cant wait for in iClone is python. Hopefully it will provide a high level user interface for doing things like making animations from morps quicker and easier to assemble.
I did a set of wave props that I intend to improve but have decided to wait for python and hoping it is a good programmers interface to iclone



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Nice job with morphs Delerna!
But I would not dismiss PopcornFX. With enough patience it could simulate pretty much close.

Here rather quick try (took about an hour) with 3 effects. A "Water hose" for the stream and 2 distortion emitters.







Delerna
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I totally agree with you, don't dismiss any of the capabilities of iClone. The whole point is that it is definitely possible to do pretty much any sort of liquid flow in iClone even though it doesn't have NVida fluid simulation. I will say that the only reason I chose to do it with morphs and not Popcorn is because I am more familiar with morphs. I have Popcorn but haven't used it much but I do see it is probably easier with Popcorn (I must get into using it). I say probably because the majority of the 8 hours it took me to do mine was making the sink parts. Also I am not expert at doing morphs so I had to do a lot of thinking and rethinking. Without that it probably would have taken an hour or two. Anyway, I'm just presenting options and I like yours. One thing I do like about doing it with morphs is that I am now a bit more familiar with it. Have gained more knowledge of how to go about creating them so the morph animations work better.




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@Delerna
I know what you mean. I morphed tears once and it took all day... and night to finish the job. In a process I've learned that current morph creator in iClone is kind of broken.
That is it cannot handle multiple consecutive morphs - when you try to move the same vertices more than once with next morph.
But then Lord Ashes posted a nice little utility (I think the download link is not available anymore).
That utility used to straighten the vertex order in OBJs so that the next morph did not disrupt the previous one (kind of hard to explain).
But if there is no need to use same vertices for multiple morphs, I usually skip the multiple OBJ routine and do all of them at once with shape keys and then move to iClone through fbx.
Been playing a lot lately with PopcornFX and a water and found that emitters are a little short with some controls to make it look how I need it.
But surprisingly someone from RL replied to my thread and promised the fix in IC v7.21. So lets hope.
I suppose combining morphs with popcorn (for splashes for instance), would make a great combo. Let's keep trying :)




Delerna
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Thinking maybe I should have put this stuff into a new post but I am trying to give ideas to the OP for using morph animation for creating slimy Jelly looking liquid.
If morph animation gets used to do that then it is basically the same process as this.

I know what you and lord ashes are saying about it not handling multiple consecutive morphs, I have had the same problems. However I have found things to do that resolve it well enough that I don't find it a big deal. Also by doing this project I am starting to discover that it is the way I model the objects used for morphing that causes a lot of that problem. I am finding that modelling the same thing differently removes that problem all together. I am going to try and demonstrate what I am saying by showing how I did this now. And then I will continue trying to improve what I have done so far. Its all been really simple so far but I am now going to start adding a character putting hands in the water and washing his face with the water falling back to the sink. Putting a cup into the Faucets water and filling it maybe even enable the water to overflow when the cup is full. Also looking into making the water overflow to the floor from the sink when it fills. Going to have a chat with Lord Ashes about what you said. I haven't seen that and it may give me some new ideas.

Anyway. Here is one example of how I do multiple morph animations on a single object without getting big problems from it.
First off here is how I modelled the water flowing down the sink and down into the sinks pipe. These will get improved later so they flow less evenly.
https://forum.reallusion.com/uploads/images/013cce9f-77eb-4e48-8384-9423.jpg

And now here is how I animate it. The only thing I didn't show is the water texture animation. That is just moving the textures position from 0.000 to 0.999 every 100 frames.
I made the FDLengthen mesh so the water would start to flow down to the sinks pipe without it having the loops before the water reaches the bottom of the sink.

Now here is a primary thing in my mind that gets around the problems you were talking about.
After doing the FDLengthen, leaving that in place and adding the FDFlow1 animation then the length would end up doubling.
But by having the FDLength reduce as the FDFlow1increases then the length stays pretty much the same and the water appears to curve to the sinks pipe reasonably well I think.
You will see I do that very often. Reduce the previous morph animation as the next one increases works OK in my opinion. And that is only my opinion, if anyone else does this sort of stuff then they will need to decide if its worth it for themselves. I really like morph animation and I think it has huge potentials that grow as my understanding of it grows.






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