Holly cow. I had no idea.
You should try and export out a more simple “sphere” version of the particle simulation and drive its shader with a wobbly noise into its displacement. I’ll bet you could simulate some nice vibration and organic motion in the water. . . while maintaining the spirit of the simulation in the Real Flow export.
oh yes, i have plans for his plugin in the future. Right now im focusing on getting another reel out 
and unfortunatelly, you would still need to generate those depth maps from realflow for it to be applicable here, which would require those pesky meshes… unless they can figure out how to render the depth maps out of the RF particles and have apporpriate smoothing mechanisms… there i go pipe dreaming again.
good idea on the noise! ill mess with it in messiah. oh oh, might need AON shaders… damn you thomas.
is there a caustics expert in the house? id love for someone to shed some light on getting good, sharp caustics.
Expert - No.
I found caustics rather hard to use and get looking good in messiah. First rule is to put the number of photons as high as possible (until messiah crashes that is). Everything else is tweaking and patience.
I wasn’t able yet to get as crisp caustics as with other renderers though.
And some things are plain wrong with the implementation. Can’t remember it all, but make sure your spotlightsource isn’t too small (then the caustics vanish).
Good luck,
P.S. what’s wrong with AoN?
lol absolutely nothing!
Yeah so i messed about with caustics, it either caused my lighting to completely blow out or ended up in big round blobs all over my scene… so i think caustics is out for me… 
yep, for this scene with all those little water particles, I guess you would need numbers of photons messiah simply can’t produce without crashing. They work best for “glass sphere on floor” scenes, everything more complex is asking for trouble. 
You also have to balance the light intensity, light size, photon amount and photon intensity to get the brightness right…
As far as ZBornToy goes: IMO it is just that, a toy (even if a very cool one) looking for an application. Since you can’t have objects behind objects in a depth map based approach, you are very limited in practice. I created some cool eyecandy with the demo but can’t imagine using it for anything but very “specific” projects.
But yes, the caustics are close to perfect…
Here is one of my tests with it (Quicktime 7):
ZBornToy_Test
As for Motionblur: the new Motionblur options in AfterEffects 7 should be able to deal with something like your scene. It actually analyzes pixel motion, not just frame-blends. Works great in some cases but not in others. Give it a try.
Cheers,
Really cool test Thomas looks great! 
Stooch have you tried setting the MAX substeps in RF to a lower setting that speeds up the calculation quite a bit.
About the motionblur, I understand realflow meshes needs a special approach, but as I understand it we miss motionblur on regular animated objects too, right? A motion vector pass should work great together with, revision fx´s, reelsmart motionblur since it support them.
In my last test, motionblur worked not only for the camera but for everything as expected.
But since it is implemented like the old LW motionblur (re-rendering the whole image at different time slices and comp them together), you need a lot of passes to get stutter-free looks for fast motion.
Antialiasing can become a problem too.
Not a real 2006-solution I fear.
Cheers,
Not future tech but nice anway. I still think a motion pass is the way to go especially if the could implent a shader for the image_filter material to use the pass inside messiah.
reelsmart needs moving vertices to figure out the motion blur. Again, these meshes are static, ill play with AE blur.
i just had an idea, maybe i can comp a depth pass of my liquid and use zborn toy to generate the caustics and blend them with my output? that might work…
soo. can someone from pmg or in the know explain how the particular messiah solution works in principle? the documentation is sparse at best, i want to have an understanding behind the hood a bit to fine tune my results.
thanks!
For motion blur? Its just like Lightwave’s older multipass solution where each pass shifts the model slightly along its motion path and its all accumulated in the end to create the “blur”. No?
and this is with absorbtion enabled (notice how it filled out the liquid towards the center)
29 minutes to render at 900 x 675
oh yeah, once again hats off to Thomas for his excellent shaders (and excellent documentation). I am using the distance node, math nodes, easy glass and color nodes. Now i have to go in and use meta effectors to fill in some of the stray blobs that got under my distance node, then i have to animate the effectors to track the blobs and animate the lights and then render. soon i will have my very first messiah render project! woohoo! Lets hope the caustics dont flutter around like lightwave!
Man I have not spent a day in AE for many months But That LOOKS REALLY COOL Thomas !
I know if i get sometime in AE that is the first thing I’ll buy !
( I only buy tools now when they job related, thing do get alittle crazy if I don’t )
