Hi, Ian
Nice movie (even in its sketch variant). But it’s RF, right? So, to create a water we cannot rely on EI plug-ins, we need to use RF (in its “in house” variant :)). Or what? We’ve no idea that “EI water” should be “absolute best in 3D”, we are just looking for a way(s) to make it better as it is now 
Yes, there is no plug-in that can do this in EI. I created that in Realflow, however getting files from realflow into EI is a nightmare.
Batch converting in O2F would be great, BUT, I am told (I don’t have it) that you still have to manually rename each file which means I would have to rename 600 files by hand. No thanks
If Jens reads this^ Feature request 
In Realflow you create a plane and it places a blob at each normal (higher density mesh, more blobs) then you link the fountain to the plane and then they can interact (create ripples). You can then apply defoms to the plane to create waves etc. I don’t have blobmaker but I’m sure it could get close… Does it do Speed streaching? I don’t think it would take many extra features to get there… Interaction with solid bodies? Okay, that would be VERY hard to impliment
Splashes are created with particles btw…
Ian
Hi, Ian
As we know, our particle systems have collision detection. But we think it’s untimely yet to talk about interaction with solid bodies if we’ve not more or less accurate simple water jet
Kill joy
I am curious, can you share you 50k blob fountain? The biggest attribute when it comes to creating realistic water must be resoluiton (more small blobs). It is certainly so with realflow.
Ian
Hi, Ian
Sorry, but no, a promo of BM features is not a goal of this thread. We can say only there is a little benefit from large muscles without a portion of brain
Okay, fair enough. Going back to your first post, interaction between particles would be the major missing link. Seeing blobs push each other around (force away from the emitter) does the trick.
Not to talk about BM too much, but in the sample movies it doesn’t seem to have this ability.
Ian
Hi, Ian
Metaballs have only vertices and facets of linked child groups. That’s too few data to organize any pushing
Maybe I missed something in this discussion but I’ve got a free plugin for importing RealFlow meshes into EI and exporting animation data from EI into RealFlow.
That having been said I’d like to see somebody do something cool in RealFlow and render it in EI with Caustics.
Hey Blair,
Yeap, your great free plug-in does the trick for very simple simulations, but anything complex simply crashes the Plug/EI.
I emailed you an example of this a couple on months ago… I can resend if you want…
Basicly, if you want to have a fountain, that’s fine, but if you want to have a realwave (for a splash or fluid flowing into a pool etc.) then you’re talking over a million polygons per .bin, the plug-in can’t handle this (you just go into a terminal loop/spinning beach ball).
A possible solution is to export .objs from Realflow instead of .bins and convert to .fac and fact cycle in EI, unfortunatly batch conversion from .obj to .fac doens’t exsist in Transporter and isn’t practical in OBJ2FAC (yet!). This would be the prefered method because .bin files don’t contain normals, but once converted to .fac you have normals, so renders are several hundred percent faster.
I’ll do you a movie with caustics this week
Ian
We talk not about RF but about how to coordinate particles+blobs in EI to make “RF here”. Accurate and step by step (no loud declarations)
FACT FORM linked to particle plug with ‘SETD’
The tags are:
That’s enough for our first adagio with blobs
Blair,
I’m afraid this is a bit rough and not at all pretty, yet, but here you go
http://homepage.mac.com/cake_or_death/watercaustics1.mov
Ian
Ian
Your water looks like very frozen vodka (yum!) and the caustics looks good. The liquid looks a bit like sirup, i think… is RealFlow?
Nice
I hope, someday we will can to import huge flows to EiAS… The Bryan plugin is a big help BTW.
FelixCat
Hey FelixCat!
Can you even freeze vodka?
It’s supposed to be water!? The liquid is far too viscous but the simulation times get prohibitive (I’d have to leave it overnight to do it properly).
Yeap it’s realflow, what impressed me the most is that this simulation previews in realtime in openGL WITH transparency preview enabled. Very impressive
I’ll improve it if/when I have time,
Ian
From what we’ve read here we understood: we should not think about “EI water”, our particle systems are busy with other, more important things/tasks and such little interior details as fountains etc. are out of their attention. Instead we must learn how to use RF. Ok, thx, clear
BTW:Vodka freezes below -30 (one of Igors is from Siberian).
hi igors, all,
i have read all of this with interest.
take a look at this:
Schwall02_mp4.mov
please pay attention only to the motion of the spheres as a whole. it is a dirty hack, sure, but i wonder how this looks with blobmaker. mr. blobby is crashing, btw.
a setup similar to this would solve the volume problem. well, it would need lots and lots of small spheres, but i am sure some genius mind can take the idea and make something more workable out of it, he?
Hi, Uwe
Impressive movie! BTW: we heard iphysically a jet’s behavior is very similar to rigid body. But liquid needs more “basic spheres/units” (not too much but we cannot hope for something rational with 100 blobs only). Of course it’s possible to replace each sphere with set of blobs (how about to use WM to check this?) but it would be as “march of separate water parts” Water needs a particle system, IMO that’s unavoidable
right, water needs particles, but the particles need some form of self-collision so they keep their volume and affect each others movement. imho, thats the main reason particles systems perform so poor (or hard to handle/setup) right now.
rodeo is obviously not the right answere to this in its current state, but it is leading in an interesting direction.
my idea would be a specialized rigid body solver that is optimized for “virtual” spheres (no need for polygons, so it can handle way more of them) together with a blob generator that is
capable of dealing with more than a few hundred particles (maybe some form of adaptive meshing).
thinking of it: the rigid body solver could be adaptive, too. if one particle is surrounded by other particles, they all act as one (keeping the volume). more to the edges they break into pieces until a user-definable threshold is reached (again keeping the volume). the blob generator somehow knows about the volume of each particle, so small blobs are possible until they again reach a user-definable threshold, after that only particles are rendered as spray.
sounds good?
i am sure there are more things to be considered (like gravity and all that stuff), but i think a system with this attributes would make very nice fountains (and other, more dramatic, things).
Uwe, a sentences like “a specialized rigid body solver” sound really awful cause they are associated with something “big, solid and needs months of work”. We think in real practice the things are much simpler. Look at water splashes for example. Each dropped blob generates a circular wave, these waves should interacts with “secondary” (reflected) blobs. Complex task? Well, not “a piece of cake”, but IMO absolute realistic and interested for us. However, the problem is that before starting we must to write a big part of particle system: emission, numerous particles options etc. etc. And all becomes to be hard, big and heavy :sad:
by the way, everyone is talking about rf, which undenieable has its strength for fluids and dynamics, but has anyone tested the Blender 2.4 fluids and the possibility to get them into Eias, as far as I know the comunitys of most of major apps, already tried or figured out to make plugs to use those opensource fluids in their own Program.
Hi Uwe, for me as an softwaremaking ignorant all you think about the potential of rodeo sounds quite promissing to me as the the rodeo-demos-movies do.
Thinking on the announced RF4 here is another (as it seems to me desperate) need for Eias, RF4 would cover if ever we could use it for more complex-simulations:
Since we have Fiber-Forge which has alot for a real nice animated 3d-Hairs, until now those Hairs don’t have any real dynamics and collission detection.
Might this be one of the “other, more dramatic, things” rodeo will do one time?
Steffen
We are not familiar with Fiber Forge to discuss what it can/cannot do. Our attempt in this area was Trooper. From our experience we can say: we would be happy to have accurate and fast hairs/fur WITHOUT any real dynamics and collision detection. Unfortunately it’s IMO impossible with phong render.
Same for water: all these cool liquid physics look too big, and, IMO, too far away from EI. Our proposition was to have a normal simple fountain first.