There is a lot of knowledge on this forum, maybe one of the experts can help me!?
I have to make a 3D animation with falling Oil-drops, the animation part I have under control, but I am struggling with the material settings for the Oil drop.
The Oil material has to look like this:
The material has to be useable for animated RealFlow Mesh.
Cheers
Hans
Um…exactly what part of the surface are you having trouble with? If you posted a render of what you have so far it would help us a lot.
GM
Thanks Jay,
I had a similar result, like this:
My problem is the multicolor hightlight, reflection stuff that also has to remain good-looking in an animation.
Cheers
Hans
I did Oil before, for another client that wasn’t so critical about the Oil material, in this example I had to lower reflections etc, to keep the Character recognizable 
Cheers
Hans
That actually looks pretty good so far.
Random thoughts:
Even if your final render is set against blue, it might still be a lot easier for your eye to judge what’s going on if you work against a black or white background.
Regarding the reflections—right now the surface seems to be reflecting a “dark ground/light sky” environment that just looks wrong in this context. I think I might turn the specular way up and the reflectivity way down and try to let the specular hilight define the form more.
I suspect the surface will need to be a lot more transparent to get the result you want. I’m not sure exactly how to verbalize this–the transparency tools in EIAS have a large number of parameters and I usually end up playing for a long time until I get what I want. I guess the best advice is: There’s a shader on the Electro303 web site called “bottle-glass1.mtr” that I use often as a base for thick refractive surfaces like this. It might be a good idea to start with that and tweak parameters until you get what you want.
Hope that helps.
GM
Hello, Hans
IMHO EI 6.0 or later provides physically correct rendering of fluid materials without third party shaders. Set full RT transparency with oil refraction index, activate Fresnel terms, set yellow transparency filter. There is only one (but enough big) “BUT”: your scene should have enough other objects to reflect/refract them in oil. So, first try (like oil drop + plane + background) is fully confused. Add a texture to plane - and oil looks much better 
Adding more objects gets more “live” to oil.
We tried other ways with more or less success, but we remember no one really good result. The first instinctive solution is to add more reflection but it always tends to mercury (especially in animation).
Thanks,
It’s great to get advice from the masters, all good suggestions.
But the Oil should look like the first image, it’s part of the logo, so the Oil doesn’t have to be realistic.
I tried a lowtech approach, and made a reflectionmap from the original image, and used it as a local recflection:
This way I can match the first image pretty close, and it even looks good animated
Cheers
Hans
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