RealFlow: Mesh/Fluid wont create Initial state. Crown Daemon not rendering on impact

[Kale Collins]

Here is my .zip of my personal project
12431_smh0002.c4d.zip.zip

~{^-^}~

[Jim Scott]

Hi Kale,

I’ve been looking at your file and in order to get any kind of reasonable simulation times I reduced the fluid resolution to .1 and shrunk the fluid containers just to reduce the particle and mesh polygon counts.

One thing I noticed was that if you want your crown to appear when the objects hit the fluid you need to change the Creation Time to around 3.5 (the objects hit at around 105 frames, which would be 3.5 seconds).

I notice a lot of bugginess with Realflow, including having the crown just stop working and having to delete and recreate it, which sounds like one of the issues you were having as well. The bugginess may also be a factor in why your simulation wasn’t working right, especially with the high number of particles and polygons you were working with. I would suggest lowering the resolution of the fluid until you get the simulation working the way you like, and then increasing it for the final rendering.

I’ll keep playing with it and see if I can offer any better advice, but as I said before I only very occasionally use this plugin and so am relearning it each time I do.

[Jim Scott]

Just to clarify:

It seems from your post that you might be assuming that the crown splash is triggered by the falling objects. The crown splash is triggered by its Creation Time setting – the point in time, measured in seconds – not by a collision.

[Jim Scott]

After playing with the simulation with the fluid resolution at .1 to speed things up I rendered out a test with the following steps:

1) Set render resolution to 640 x 320 (crown Creation Time set to 3.5)
2) Set fluid resolution to .5 and ran the simulation to around 45 frames to let the fluids settle
3) Created initial state
4) Cached simulation and mesh
5) rendered movie file

Note: Your textures will look different as I didn’t have access to several of the jpg texture files. Project time was increased to 230 frames to allow crown splash to complete.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/hy18msvo7cgro3p/SMH_movie.mov?dl=0

[Kale Collins]

Wow brilliant! I’m bummed I’m just seeing this. but excited to give this a shot. I will update with my results:)

~{^-^}~

[Jim Scott]

Some issues that I ran into (which I chalk up to bugginess of the plugin and inexperience on my part) were sometimes needing to delete and recreate the mesher object (may need to click on Build Mesh), and occasionally doing the same with the Crown daemon.

Just to recap: Work at a fluid resolution of .1 until you get the crown set-up and the creation time to your liking, and then before caching the simulation and meshes for rendering set it back to .5 (or whatever you desire). Unless you want the fluid to be initially splashing around, which results from it being released from its fill object, run the simulation until it settles down, stop the playback at that point and create an initial state. Then cache the simulation and meshes before rendering.

Good luck and have fun.

Edit: Also, to reduce the particle and polygon counts decrease the sizes of the container and fill objects so that the sides are just outside of the field of view.

[Steve Bentley]

So I take it Jim, that you are using the RF plug in within C4d and you can do your sims within C4d correct? In that case, I’ve been talking out of my hat. We use RF, and I assumed the OP was too, using RF as a standalone program. (we do it this way so we can also use RF with houdini etc as well).

If the c4d sim plugin works with dynamics that might be a good reason to use the plug in within C4D. What we normally have to do is bring a stunt object into standalone RF and let it bump into the fluid there in order to sim the reacting mesh before we import the final mesh (collisions and all) into C4d.
On the downside, I don’t think some of the sheeting algorithms are available in the plug in version.

[Jim Scott]

Hi Steve,

That’s right, Kale and I are using the RF plugin. I only play with it occasionally so I’m not well versed in it, but from what little comparison I’ve done the standalone version has several advantages including being able to float objects, something the plugin cannot do. The plugin does have basic dynamics in order to designate collision objects to direct the flow, contain the fluid, etc. I think it’s advantage is that it’s integrated into C4D so there’s no going back and forth, which is what it sounds like you were referring to. It also seems to be oriented towards motion graphics applications, fluids flying around fruit… that kind of thing, rather than the more realistic stuff that the standalone seems to cater to. And the standalone can work with lots of different programs, including Houdini as you mentioned, which is way above my knowledge level and capabilities.

From your posts I can tell that your experience and work is multiple levels above mine, as I am just a hobbyist who simply tries to help out others here when I can, hopefully passing on what little tidbits I’ve learned over the years of fooling around with C4D. And I try to leave the tougher questions to the experts like yourself.

[Steve Bentley]

Hey Jim,
You’re selling yourself short. You’re always coming up with great solutions.
I’ll have to give the plugin a go. The going back and forth in and out of C4d and RF can get tedious and time consuming. We’ve done a bunch of fruit but we’re usually throwing coke bottles through sheets of liquid.

I’m also curious how fast the sim processes with the plug in or what the upper limit is of particles. With C4D already clogging the ram I’m surprised it can do the job. I’ve actually burned out a few machines running sims for days in the standalone app.

[Jim Scott]

Thanks Steve,

Definitely give the plugin a try. I see they now have a version for Maya if that’s something that you use as well. The fact that fluid simulations are so taxing on a machine is probably the biggest reason I don’t play around with it much. I’ve got a decent but older Mac Pro, but as you know fluid sims need major horse power, and/or a render farm.

Take care.