Creating Running Water

[mouj]

Howdy !

My guess would be that particles are the way to go, but i'm not sure whereas Max's standard particles would let you do the effects you mention.
If so, then i'd say use particle systems with metaparticles as ptype; else you'll need to go for a third party solution like Realflow (which is quite expansive).

Then, maybe the materials you'll be using will be as important as the geometry/particles themselves, if you need to create realistic looking water.
(again, Realflow comes with a specific shader for its meshes, called FlowTracer, but i could not give you any info as to how to use it and results you could expect).

mouj

[BrandonD]

It's been done long before fluid tools came around. You just have to be creative. I'd suggest looking into particles and geometry. In fact, lots of flowing-types of effects I've done with just animated geometry that was mapped in a clever way. Particles can be animated to look like water, you just can't use the default settings. Take a splash for instance, it doesn't just suddenly turn on and uniformly throw water in to the air. The movement of the water droplets ramps up and down over time, the power of the impact being a bit of a gaussian curve. This should be applied to both the speed of emission as well as the emission rate. That's just for starters. The tricky stuff with water effects is that getting it to move correctly is half the battle, making it render and look like water is an equally difficult portion of the equation.

[Signal2Noise]

There's some great tutorial examples of all of those things you're looking for in 3ds max Magic 4. Even if you're using ver. 5 the book will help. Also, I think there's a water tutorial in either this month's or last of 3D World magazine (that over-sized, over-priced UK mag).

[Oktavian]

This is also a goog tutorial:
http://www.cgarchitect.com/resources/tutorials/SM_waterfall.pdf

[amckay]

I hate how everyone thinks fluids are the answer to anything and everything :)
going to another app to do straight forward stuff right away makes the process of tweaking things 10 times slower
it's sometimes handy for more complicated stuff to run a fluid simulation even just to see how another app would do it if you're having problems getting the feel of it right, but it's always best to keep things all in one package and with the most straight forward of answers rather than go over the top on simple things like running water.

Although Brandon's probably covered everything that needs to be said here, for a waterfall you don't necessarily need to resort to particles for the base, this can easily be achieved through textures a lot of the time and then some soft big steam particles rising up at the base. Small fine boxes or spheres with a stead particle count can easily simulate water splashes on rocks ect. And wet surfaces of water dripping down can sometimes work really well as a composit material with a noise noisy gradient ramp overlayed over the texture moving downward to simulate layers of water dripping down a surface.

[neversong]

I tried Realflow...and it worked really great!

but the only and the biggest problem was...
the rendering time on normal PCs....

but the result is amazing.

[CGTalk Moderation]

This thread has been automatically closed as it remained inactive for 12 months. If you wish to continue the discussion, please create a new thread in the appropriate forum.