creating a lava lamp animation

[Brian Jones]

it would help a lot to have x-particles (or another capable of fluid sim) but without those, as you say softbodies with turbulence but use a Wind object with turbulence turned on. Also use Areodnamic forces in the soft body and Aerodynamic wind in the Wind object.
Here’s a test with two Wind objects one with infinite falloff to generally ‘push upward’ with another wind with a cylindrical falloff to push up in the centre like the hotspot of a real lava lamp. Very crude but with more sizes and some tweaking in the soft body tags… 9652_lavalampblobtrial.c4d.zip

[Victor Camacho guerrero]

Thanks so much Brian,

which tweaks would you go with the softbodies? By far the most convincing I have achieved in the end, is actually using metaballs and Wind Deformers. I put the wind deformer inside the balls and then animating the metaballs or/and using softbodies. It is far from perfect to be honest.

Many thanks!

[Brian Jones]

Stiffness/Flexion settings and Pressure (I just tried bringing that down to Pressure 2 with Volume Conservation at 20 and that’s more ‘squishy’) settings should be most responsible for how deformable the spheres are. I’d also try tweaking the settings of the winds which is better to have at what speed, tweak the turbulence values as well to see if a *lot* of turbulence is better and in which wind it’s better to have the most turbulence… I don’t know if that way or yours is better or something else maybe particles is the way to go – a lot depends on whether you want the separate blobs of your second reference ( an older lava lamp) or the more joined blob of a new lava lamp.