liquid mercury

#1

Hi All,

I am trying to create a short animation which begins with a letter ‘S’ melting away into a puddle like mercury. I have never really done anything like this before and wondered if anyone could steer me in the right direction.

Is soft body dynamics a way to go?

I not really sure where to start with this.

Any help greatly appreciated!

Many Thanks.

#2

This is a tricky one… You’ve got two major challenges here…

The liquid mercury is done with some form of particles of course… So the transition between clean, sculpted geometry and particles… You might need to transition between the two in post.

Here’s the other problem: Viscosity. Lightwave particles don’t have it. Liquid mercury droplets will tend to cohese / stick together. A 3rd party particle system like realflow can do it easily… But it’s not cheap. I have a demo version of it that came with Computer Graphics World. It’s cool and only limits the number of particles you can use (plenty for your project). Unforunately the demo on their site is also limited by the amount of time you can use it.

#3

Thanks for the reply…I will check out realflow.

Cheers

#4

Yeah you might need to make two versions of your S. One geometry and one out of an array of particles. I think you can have the particles be fixed until they come into contact with a collision null… Cloth works that way anyway… The trick is making only the active ones show and blending that into the geometry version.

#5

Thanks for that. Sounds like thats the way to go.

I did find a cool little free plugin called PG_Melt which melts an object by displacement. It could be an option if all else fails.

Thanks again. :slight_smile:

#6

It is one way to go… But it’s a two-thousand dollar way to go. :confused:

I just remembered another little item you might find useful. And this is part of Lightwave. I am playing with it and can’t get it to work. On your particle emitter, in properties in the Deform tab choose “HvDeform” and on a surface it interacts with (Collision object[s]), choose “HvDeform Surface”

What it is SUPPOSED to do is squish the particles so they conform to the shape of the surface they are interacting with. I’ve seen renderings of it and it’s kinda cool. But all it does for me is make the HyperVoxels not render.

Good luck!

#7

Great! That sounds like exactly the sort of thing I’m looking for!

#8

Well the particles still don’t stick together. They go right through eachother which is lame.

#9

You could also try Blender.
Create the S, export it as an .obj then follow one of the many tutes around.
looks really good.
and free

#10

I couldn’t get hv deform to work properly either…I’ll take a look at blender and see if I can get anywhere with that.

Thanks for the advice!

#11

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