CGTalk - fluids-refractive distortion ?!

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lowkey

11-10-2002, 01:14 PM

hi all,

i'm trying to create the following scene:
a brain swimming in a glass cylinder filled with nutrition fluid. -

now i already modelled the brain and cylinder, but i don't know how to make that fluid work.

several experiments with fluid dynamics brought no satisfying results. :hmm:

i tried to create a 3d container inside the glass, switched off all the borders and wanted to make the fluid and glass collide, so that it realistically fills up the volume.

what i want to achieve is that kinda blurry underwater effect. slight refractive distortion, if you know what i mean. :shrug:

the whole thing will be rendered in a toony kind of fashion so photorealism is not essential.

i hope this makes sense. any help will be welcome ! :)

PS:
the shading on the attached picture's just a raw approximation of the final result (at least i hope so !)

Stahlberg

11-11-2002, 10:03 AM

I'm not sure why you're using fluid dynamics, do you need to see any sloshing of the fluid at the top? If not, just use raytracing on a piece of geometry. You did use raytracing right? That's the only way to get refraction and real reflections etc.

The glass cylinder should be 'double-walled', that is it should have an outside and an inside, separated by the thickness of the glass. Then you need another cylinder for the fluid, just copy one of the glass-cylinders and scale it down a bit and assign a slightly murky perhaps a bit green-glowing shader to it. You could also experiment with blurry refraction, though it's very slow to render.

The refractive index of water is about 1.33, assume the fluid is a bit thicker than water and make it 1.4. The glass can be about 1.5.
(But if these values look wrong for this particular image, you should change them until they look right, no matter what crazy values you end up with. Just take them as starting points.)

lowkey

11-11-2002, 03:29 PM

thanks a lot, Stahlberg ... i already came up with that geometry-based method myself ! it works fine ... :thumbsup:

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