Wetwork-A VFX short with fluids simulations

Story board

Moodboard

The making

Block in the environment Maya scale in meters.Using a simple base mesh as a scale referense to scene.

Camera rigg

Normalmap Texture Displacments

Stencil

Basemesh

Foam created from basemesh

Splash created from basemesh

Real flow sceneHybrido grid based domain

In Real flow I used a so called “hybrido” based grid domain to simulate my fluid particles. Hybrido are it's made for large scale simulations and it can handle more particles than a regular emitter in Real flow. With the hybrido in use I was able to generate other particles from the base fluid, like splash and foam particles. I simulated the splash particles several times, with some minor changes on the settings to get more variation and freedom in the compositing part.

Fun things:

The Real flow simulation bin files took almost 110gb of hard drive space. So when you starting to simulate big scales of water, make sure you got hard drive space!

In real flow one grid square is exactly 1 m x 1 m, so you think of that when you are scaling the scene.

Almost 1million splash particles in the end, simulation time 7h 32min :) with quad core i5 and 16gig of ram memory.

5.8million particles about 1hour sim time.

1.5million particles

Basemesh and splash mesh with mia_material and displacements

Splash particles rendred RFRK render kit in Maya with menta ray

For the base mesh I used a simple mia_x_passse shader with displacements that I got from Real flow, I used HDRI image based lightning and I tried to render it out with final gather, but it was to much for my machine and took to long time, so I skipped the FG and rigged up some lights and bounce lights to fake the final gather instead.

I used the same particle sequence with different shader settings and changed the start frame on the mist so it would come lite after the splash particles in order to save some time, with not simulating the mist in Real flow.

Goals with the project:

Learn more about:

- Shaders

- Lightning for production

- Optimiziation

- Advance rendering with Mental Ray

- advanced simulations

- compositing

- Learn to use Real flow

- Create a realistic looking environment

- comp in live footage

What I could have done differently:

- Environment

- camera movement

Problems:

- batch render problem with layers and contribution maps

- changed the Maya scale settings to meter, bad for Real flow!

- forgot to plan in the render time!

Evaluation

- Learned alot about Real flow and it's powers.

- I have learned a new way of texturing

- Learned how displacements work together with normal maps.

- Too little compositing and post effects