Hi,
Is it possible to create condensation effect like this with nParticles (meshing) or nCloth?
As you can see the droplets are not spheres, they kind of want to stick to the surface and some edges are not smooth. How can I simulate this effect?
Thanks
Is this static or animated? If it’s static, there are simpler ways. I might try MASH or XGen instancing, or maybe creating a plane under the surface and generating a high-res displacement map that pushes the plane above the surface to create the bubbles. I’m guessing animated, though.
The challenge I’ve always found with particles is that once you want high detail like this you start needing a very high particle resolution, and that makes things slow and a lot harder to control. Surface tension seems to be hard to simulate, which also makes things like water droplets and flowing rivulets difficult. I’m also interested in how people would do this sort of thing (just for education in my case), but I have a feeling most of the answers will be “I gave up years ago and use expensive dedicated water simulation packages instead”…
For starters let’s say static.
It’s just I have no idea how to get that “non-sphere” effect. One way could be meshing nParticles and converting it to nCloth. But that still doesn’t create those sticky edges.
Go Soup + VDBs
There are few nodes that you play with for example, reaction diffusion + point cloud builder, then you can use the instance manager as well.
In Houdini will be similar workflow.
Yeah. I should try SOuP sometime.
Though it would be good to know how far we can go using only Maya’s tools.
A voronoi or other “cell shader” could be pretty useful. That is, using Maya’s fractal nodes. I’ve never come close to this effect though.
You could totally pull this off with nParticle blobbies and some heavy scripting. I just don’t know if anyone’s done that before.
If it’s just static, use a texture map. It’s making it realistic and dynamic for animation that would be troublesome.