Realflow unstable. Alternative?

[soccerrprp]

http://www.remotion4d.net/

Phytools? Try the plugin at above. May want to ask others who have or are using it for more information or contact the designers.

Hope this helps.

Richard

[Pesto]

Seems you and I are in the same boat here. I am looking for a similar tool but RealFlow is out of my price range. I have been checking out the "Add-to-the-Sea" plug-in and just doing it in Blender. There is also DPIT Nature Spirit but I didn't see any fluid examples on the webpage.

I tried to download a demo of Add-to-the-Sea but couldn't find one of the webpage. It does seem like a very nice plug-in thou.

Blender on the other hand has a really nice fluid system...awesome actually and very easy to use. You just have to get use to another program, which really isn't that hard. Check out this demo...very cool.
http://www.blendernation.com/2006/08/07/siggraph-fluid-demo/

There is always LW too if you have access to it. It can do fluids as well

[Pesto]

Richard - forgot about Remotion. I just didn't see any low viscosity examples (liquid-type). The 2 videos were of more soft body-type. Gotta look into it more thou.

[RARIAN]

I am trying out Phytools out now. I can try lightwave also, but like to have it inside C4D.
Should install blender again (for the 10th time, always rejecting because of the interface and renderer :)) but it looks pretty impressive especially the movies at the end.

[RARIAN]

Richard - forgot about Remotion. I just didn't see any low viscosity examples (liquid-type). The 2 videos were of more soft body-type. Gotta look into it more thou.

There are some Phytools ViFlud (a new 3d liquid simulator) examples that can be download , will try it out more and will let you know.

you can find some nice examples here:
http://www.remotion4d.net/redokuwiki/doku.php?id=xsph_examples

[stevester1]

If realflow isn't working out for you guys, try Blender Fluids. They are more accurate than phystools (tbh, the results from blender will resemble those of realflow) and the application is free. Ops, just saw that someone else mentioned blender, my apologies.

[RARIAN]

Phytools works nice, but not for filling my glass. The particles are slipping through it. Also after reverse normals (see image). Seems to be a know problem:

http://www.c4dportal.com/forum/showthread.php?t=1532

[Pesto]

I bought the "Introducing Character Animation with Blender" book last week. The first 20 pages or so goes into the interface enough that you will be able to find your way around easily. I had Blender open and was trying all the commands as I was reading and it demystified the interface for me. From there I was able to do some fluid stuff without many issues. Of course I would love to keep it all within C4D too.

[stevester1]

I bought the "Introducing Character Animation with Blender" book last week. The first 20 pages or so goes into the interface enough that you will be able to find your way around easily. I had Blender open and was trying all the commands as I was reading and it demystified the interface for me. From there I was able to do some fluid stuff without many issues. Of course I would love to keep it all within C4D too.

I have that plus the Blender fluids DVD from cmivfx, I'm really liking the results.

[Pesto]

I also bought their Fluid DVD for Blender last week (http://www.cmivfx.com/product_blender_fluids.asp). Very helpful and nice people at CMIVFX. I can't wait to get it! Would love to see C4D get a feature like this.

[stevester1]

I also bought their Fluid DVD for Blender last week (http://www.cmivfx.com/product_blender_fluids.asp). Very helpful and nice people at CMIVFX. I can't wait to get it! Would love to see C4D get a feature like this.

The fluids from remotion are looking good, it's obviously going to go threw alot of changes but I think we could get some blender results faster than you can say final render stage 2 for mac osx. :).

However, there is a fluid simulator called Aquarius (http://www.magicpics.com/aquarius/aquarius_gallery.html) that is based on Thinking Particles (inside 3ds max)...maybe someone will be able to apply it to C4D one day.

[chalkman]

Wow! those Aquarius fluid simulations look awesome! Especially the water into the glass! :thumbsup:

Cheers,

David

[unseenthings]

I am trying out Realflow in combination with C4D but I am experiencing a lot of instability with exporting an importing rather simple files. Exporting the sd file is often crashing C4D, sometimes have to remove the materials of objects. Importing the sd files in realflow sometimes eats all my CPU and objects/keyframes are meshed up when animating.

My project is to fill up a glass of wine and turn the glass 360 degrees while the glass is standing a little diagonal \ so you see the 'wine' floating against the inside of the glass.
Anybody any idea how to create this (without realflow).

By reading some post, I found a plugin FIZZ, but when copying this to my plugin dir it doesn't seem to work anymore? (c4d 10).

Thanks.
Realflow is great, but it is a bit finicky.... I've found .sd export to work pretty well, but you usually have to strip everything else out of the scene except the affected objects, make sure they're triangulated, and then you're good. But... I would only use .sd if you've got animated assets in the scene.

For what you're describing, here's how I would do it... I would triangulate and export the wineglass as a static .obj or something like that, bring that into realflow, do the simulation, and when you're done, you can animate the glass and fluid doing the 360 inside of Cinema. You can rotate (or move or scale or whatever) the "fluid" object just like anything else. And if Realflow is out of your price range (as it normally is) -- bear in mind there's a fully functional 30 day demo on their site, and a fully functional non-time limited version (but limited to 50,000 particles, which is plenty for a lot of stuff) on a 3D World from a few months back.

You could do the same thing with Blender fluids.... getting the blender fluids dvd would probably help quite a bit. It looks great, and they keep working on the fluid solver...

Anyway, I know you wanted to know how to do it w/o realflow, but if you wanted to give RF another shot, that's how I'd approach what you described.

[RARIAN]

Anyway, I know you wanted to know how to do it w/o realflow, but if you wanted to give RF another shot, that's how I'd approach what you described.

I am trying out realflow because that is the only option left I think (Phytools just doesn't work ok whith animating objects). Indeed you have to strip down the scene before exporting to RF, sometimes it crashes with sd export only because of a specific assigned material.

The only thing is if I don't know if have to create the metaballs inside realflow, now I am assigning the particles to a 1 point polygon metaballs object but the 'wine' looks more like liquid chewing gum. I did increase the RF density, amount of particles, different emiter types, hull values in C4D etc but the liquid is not against the glass anymore because it smoothes. I read that in RF you have some more metaball settings.

see example movie (don't mind the wine texture and end burst):
www.rarian.com/renders/realflow5.mov (http://www.rarian.com/renders/realflow5.mov)

[unseenthings]

I am trying out realflow because that is the only option left I think (Phytools just doesn't work ok whith animating objects). Indeed you have to strip down the scene before exporting to RF, sometimes it crashes with sd export only because of a specific assigned material.

The only thing is if I don't know if have to create the metaballs inside realflow, now I am assigning the particles to a 1 point polygon metaballs object but the 'wine' looks more like liquid chewing gum. I did increase the RF density, amount of particles, different emiter types, hull values in C4D etc but the liquid is not against the glass anymore because it smoothes. I read that in RF you have some more metaball settings.

see example movie (don't mind the wine texture and end burst):
www.rarian.com/renders/realflow5.mov (http://www.rarian.com/renders/realflow5.mov)
I *always* create the metaballs inside realflow. C4D's metaballs are *okay* and you can get some decent results in some situations if you play with them a lot, but they're a lot harder to tweak, and a lot slower.

In realflow, hit Ctrl-5 to add a Mesh object with current emitters, then expand it to show your emitter, then go into the emitter parameters (under the mesh object, not the actual emitter parameters) -- if you use the default parameters here, it'll still be pretty globby. If you go into Field and change the Blend Factor to something a lot lower (like 50) and turn on Speed Stretching and Speed Flattening (under Deformation) -- you'll probably end up with a very nice mesh. Also, a lot of people don't realize it, but you should get your particle flow right, and then go back and create the mesh (without doing the particle flow again) with the Build Meshes icon at the top. Import that into C4D via the mesh loader, and you should have a very nice mesh.

HTH...

[RARIAN]

I think creating the mesh in RF is the way to go. Have to tweak around with the settings but it already gives me more opportunities then the metaballs in C4D. Realflow has a real trial and error workflow, but once you know it can work...

Thanks for your help, I will post a new render as soon as I have reached the quality that is in my mind :)

BTW didn't read my 3dworld mag that good, great to already have RF (downloaded the trial) :)

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