4 Ways to Make Fluid Look Like Houdini in Blender!

recently on Instagram I posted a fluid dynamics reel showing some sweet motion design I did in blender to represent like a skincare hydration brand without further Ado we can just look at these images so we're going to just go through some of the animations that I've made for this and we're going to just cover how to create all of these simulations now they are a bit unorthodox and you might be surprised how I made some of these but that's why we're making this tutorial because there are a lot of other ways of doing things that might help you free yourself and be more creative while you're working before we start I want to cover a couple of things that will make sure that your renders look correct now when I see people render bubbles a lot of times it's easy to miss one simple step they might say isn't a bubble just a sphere that you throw in a particle system and yeah it is but if you invert the normals on your sphere then it will look like there's air inside of it if you don't it will look like water molecules inside of more water which will look very similar to the air but it will look wrong so we can see a bigger image of that here substantially better makes a huge difference you might also be surprised to find out that not a single one of these visuals used fluid simulations what's my secret cloth simulations now you might not realize it but cloth simulations actually even have some fluid functions built into them so we're going to cover that so let's just hop in and let's get started alrighty we are in a new scene here we're just going to select everything and delete and then we're going to save this somewhere useful we're going to call this fluids and then we're going to come up to the edit Tab and we are going to click on preferences we need to add the extra so type in extra mesh objects so right here this one right here alrighty then when you hit shift a you should find a round Cube which you can then open this left corner menu and change the operator preset to quad sphere which then gives us this wonderful sphere that has nice top audio that we can shade smooth now let's just duplicate this and hit GX to move it to the side and we're just going to call this a bubble now we talked about inverting the bubble normals so in the viewport overlays up here in the top right corner of the viewport we can click face orientation and then if we select our bubble object and then hit alt n flip and then tab we can see that that is inverted so then we're going to uncheck face orientation and come back to this guy we're going to duplicate it again scale it up and hit Ctrl 1 to add a control one to add a subdivision modifier and then we're going to call this skin and then this other round key we're going to call the fluid bouncy balls just like that we're going to also just hide this skin for now because we just need to focus on this so then we're going to hit Tab and I'm just going to use the scale shift d and Ctrl l to just move these around and just make a collection of little spheres that I like that I think fits our simulation I'm not gonna do too many of these just to keep the Sim light and fast for you guys to follow along but you can do as much as your computer and your vision demands that's looking pretty good for me so I'm gonna hit tab and control s and then the next step is to add a cloth modifier so in here we need to change the quality steps up here to like 10 then we're going to turn on the pressure and add 10 to that and change our fluid density to 0.1 and we're going to find our cache open that shape and collisions and then we're going to change the collisions to 10 on the quality and then check self collisions as well we also need to come into field weights and turn off gravity unless you want them to fall onto something then you can use gravity but for this case it does not need it alrighty then if we play we can see that now they are not affected by gravity which is awesome so we're just going to I'm going to tab in here a rotate z180 I kind of want these other shapes to be on the front control L scale tab and that looks pretty darn good I'm going to move these a bit closer to each other so that we don't have too much Insanity going on when we simulate these cool all right the next step is to shift a add a force field and add a force we're going to set this strength to negative 1000 and then we're going to just hit spacebar and see how these work we're going to look at how they collide with one another and we're going to hit Z wireframe just to see if we see anything colliding or penetrating one of the other surfaces we look good but if it does happen it usually means that one of your balls was one of your spheres was intersecting with it before the simulation starts or that your Collision number is too low on the quality here which then you can increase it up to like 12 but 10 usually gives us everything we need so this is looking great we're going to hit Ctrl 1 to add a subdivision modifier to that too that's looking really nice get some good bounce and compression in between these spheres I love that so the next step is to bake this out as an alembic so we're going to go export alembic check selected objects check apply subdivisions and uncheck the export hair then we're just going to export that to our same folder it should go fairly quickly alrighty then we're going to save our fluid bouncy balls cloth SIM for later and we're going to click file import Olympic and just bring that other one back in and now it runs really nice and fast in our viewport and it is an object which means we can scale it and the simulation will still run and can be effect in different ways the reason we did this is because the particle simulation that we're going to add here works much better when it is an alembic instead of the baked geometry so in this particle system we made we're going to call this bubbles and we're going to hit hair I'm going to click Source emit from volume and I'm going to bring the Jitter amount to two then we're going to click on render renders object and then we're going to check this and just select the bubble then we're going to hit scale roundness and put it to 0.8 I'm going to bring this down to like point to five or something now let's go into this view just to see what we've got um that's too many let's bring this number down to like 500 and let's bring this to 0.01 and just see how that looks yeah that's looking pretty okay I think I would like this to me can we go above no dang we can't go above two okay well yeah we'll just stick with that maybe bring this up to point nine yeah that's better I think that's all right let's move on so now we need a okay there we go then I'm going to come to the material section we're going to make our glass Shader so we need to click on the base color and just drag this value all the way to the top because it starts at 0.8 and we're going to take our roughness down to zero then we're going to click on our transmission and hit one then our ior to 1.33 which is the index of refraction of water alrighty now we have a sweet glass color but we need to assign that to our bubble as well so we'll just drop this down and we need to make sure that's labeled glass so we know what it is now that's looking really nice sweet awesome okay next step is bringing our skin back in and we just need to make sure that it encases everything within this view we can maybe scale it down a little bit it just needs 10 case all of these other spheres or the simulation will look unusual and then we're just going to come to the modifier Tab and we're and we're going to find a shrink wrap then we're going to drop or select our fluid bouncy balls alubik and let's just name this with an ABC so that we can tell it apart from the other one and now we can see it is making this cool look but we're going to bring the shrink wrap behind the subdivision surface and then we're going to bring this offset until it covers all of the bouncy balls and then when we play it will adjust just like that but then on top of that we're going to add a smooth just to bring out that softness just a bit and then we're going to repeat it by five and that's just going to make it extra soft and easy to work with and it's going to just look a little bit better because sometimes the shrink wrap can have a few glitches and so the smooth makes it work just a bit better alrighty that's fine and when it's in its extended state then it might be okay let's see how far it is from him yeah that's a bit too far for me so we're gonna leave that at the point too that it was because as long as they're inside of it on this part then we're totally okay so maybe that's how we should dial it and we should bring it in on these like this and just see how close we can get it okay that's pretty good alrighty so now we have this cool moving surface and we're just going to also add a solidify modifier to that before the smooth now this will be kind of nice we don't want it to intersect with anything so we're going to change that offset to one so that it goes outward yeah that's good that is good alrighty next we're going to just come into this rendered view so that we can see yeah cool and then we need to add the glass material to it let's find a less overbearing view yeah that's all right I can maybe 0.1 is a better offset for these yeah that looks much better alrighty then we need a particle system on the skin so we're going to add that we're going to change it to hair number to 2500 and we're going to say it's on the faces oops and we're going to increase the Jitter amount object and we're just going to drop or select that bubble again and then we're going to increase our scale Randomness to 0.9 and just dial in that size I'm going to put it at .005 just because I want these to not distract from the larger bubbles inside of these bouncy balls okay so next step here is to set up our lighting so we're going to come back to this and check our scene lights in world we're going to hit one I'm going to hit shift a mesh plane and we're just going to scale it up really big rotate on the X 90. and then we're gonna hit g y and just bring this back we don't want it too close to these to ensure that the light spills correctly then we're going to hit shift a light Point lamp we're going to move that closer to the wall and then we're going to bring this up to about 2500 that looks a bit bright so maybe 1500 yeah and then we're going to duplicate This Plane shift d y and just hold Ctrl and then we're going to rotate it on the x180 so that the correct face is facing outwards and then we're going to come to this object tab here and hit viewport display call it wire and visibility and we're going to uncheck camera now we can see through it so that our camera is not blocked by that plane now we can see that we get some really cool bubble effects when we're looking through this now we're going to hit one then we're going to hit view line view to cursor and then shift a camera camera and then Control Alt 0 and that will Center everything correctly without us having to do much work and then we can just zoom in and out with the camera to view that's looking pretty good right there and sweetness I might zoom out just a bit there we go yeah that looks great sweet and now all you have to do to change the color is adjust the point light color so maybe we want like a slightly warmer tone or we could go kind of a colder blue like we did with my renders online this is looking pretty darn good alrighty that is how I made the first effect next we're going to hit Ctrl s to save this and then we're going to hit Ctrl shift s and just make a second version of this now we're doing this just to make it easier for us to make the next project file so we don't have to redo all of our work so I'm just going to delete that skin and then I'm also going to delete delete those bouncy ball Olympics and we're going to reactivate our cloth Sim ones and we're gonna delete our bakes we're gonna come here to the cloth settings and we're just gonna looks like we don't have a bake right now so we're just going to delete all bakes to make sure and then we can see that they play live and we're going to hit tab and we're gonna go into wireframe mode and we're just going to start moving these around because we want to clear them from the center so that we can make the negative fill effect oops Ctrl l g shift d scale shift d scale down let me grab these Ctrl L shift d rotate G shift d control LG and we're just going to keep doing a few of these this looks like a good number now we're going to try and make sure that they're all on the same plane so Ctrl l g y we're just going to try and get them centered along the x-axis so we're just going to bring these in control l g y Ctrl l g y lgy all right that's looking pretty darn good so we've got this open space and we're going to hit shift a when we're out in object mode and we're going to hit Cube now that's pretty much the right size of cube I want and hit tab one maybe scaled up a little bit and then we're going to hit 3 and I'm just going to select here in the middle from the camera view and just delete the faces now we have these other faces if we hit two I can control alt Edge select these other edges and hit e and then escape and then scale I'm going to hit shift y to scale it on everything that's not perpendicular to that then we can just scale it on the z-axis to bring that into the right frame and that looks good to me the reason we're doing this is this is going to be our container and that ensures that our bubbles fit correctly when it's making the negative space now we're also going to make a shape key really quick just so that we can adjust the distance between these so that we can squish those spheres really into a nice pocket and make sure they're distributed equally so we're going to hit Tab and as long as we're on key I'm just going to turn the value up to one I'm just going to hit scale Y and just bring that in like this and then if I hit tab then now we can control that right there and you can find that in the vertex groups tab here or the object added properties is the actual name of the tab and then we can see that it's getting ignored so we will select it go to the simulation and call it a collision and uncheck single-sided now if we play Boom we've got these sweet spheres and then if we animate our shape key which is in that vertex tab we can then select this and we can hit I and then at frame 10 basically whenever these start impacting then we're going to want it to constrict let's just say one or 0.75 we don't need to go all the way and there we go that just ensures that it really squishes down oh yeah let's say 20 and let's just say one and then I forgot to hit I okay now it should work correctly and you can see now it squishes them and make sure there's not too much space for the balls to go behind and in front of each other that increases the likelihood that your spheres are going to be evenly distributed so it looks like we need to increase that distance on our simulation for the cloth so we're just going to say that quality goes up to 12. and then if you need to if you keep having issues with it intersecting like this because for example that one's already intersecting then the best way to deal with it is just to scale that sphere down but if that's not your option that's not your issue then you can just increase the subdivision on this plane and that will help with the collisions but we're going to try and keep things clean and Light and that creates a nice squish effect on that view let's look at how that's going I want to maybe tab a rotate these around like this just to see what that does to the simulation yeah I like that way more sweet and then on this one I actually kind of want to bring that pressure up or even better let's just bring the force down let's call that negative 500. and then we should get less insane destruction between those sphere pieces and it settles in nicely around that maybe we can set it negative 750. to get a nice equivalent like that sweet that looks pretty darn good so I'm going to just bake that out select these scroll down to that and click bake now that we have that baked let's just look at this and that looks nice that looks really great now we have this big plane in our way so let's come in and the object properties let's just make that invisible to the camera and make it a wire now we'll see that it's affecting all this other stuff let's just hide it it doesn't need to be in the scene at all now we can export this as an alembic and we'll do the same thing that we did for the last one make sure that our selected objects is on apply subdivisions and Export hair stuff is off that should go really quickly now let's just hide that and import our alembic there we go now let's apply our glass material and let's just see how that looks wonderful looks awesome sweet now you should get the idea of how that will work if you have even more and that can create a really nice bubble effect now we're just going to add the actual bubble particle system click on hair change that number to I don't know 2500 set it to volume bring a jittering amount up to two then we're going to take the object as our render and we're going to drop select that bubble and we're going to see Insanity so 0.005 and we're going to change that scale to 0.8 now we've got some sparse bubbles so let's change that to 0.075 man 0.0075 we got a unusual distribution over here so let's just change that seed see if we get anything better say point one so those are just too big for me so we're gonna sacrifice and say 0.05 and this one's going to be tiny so let's yeah let's stick to 0.075 good enough and we'll just drag that down to equal them out a bit and then we can bring that size down to 0.05 in general 0.075 I yeah we're just going to stick with that man that is a small number now that should be it for the negative space this will gives you a nice place to put like a a square graphic or you could put text and you can do this with any shape it doesn't have to be a square but you get the idea now we're going to hit shift s and we're going to hit Ctrl shift s and re-save this as a fluids three and then we're going to delete the alembic file again and we're going to unhide these and we're actually just going to delete these as well because now we're going to make the plane with the fake water and we're going to just scale one up and bring it in here like this and then we're just gonna yeah that's way too big let's bring that down like this perfect and then we're going to just subdivide that one more time oops subdivide cool alrighty then we're going to select that same glass material that we used if we go to zero then we should probably move this point lamp down and then closer to the wall just a little bit and then we're going to bring that up to 2000. and then what we're going to do is we're going to hit shift a and we're just going to use a UV sphere this time and we're going to make a new particle system and we're going to set the number to like 50. and then we're going to change it to hair volume jittered amount and then we're going to change the render path like usual to our instance bubble now if everything works correctly and we change these to like that then if we set it to a glass material we should have after we shade it smooth of course we should have a lovely particle system I set these to small 0.01 that is not looking correct this is not there we go I just had to agitate it for some reason it wasn't showing up so we're just going to bring those sizes down 0.01 looks great control s and now if we go into rendered view we've got a lovely little bubble now if we scale that down just a little bit Ctrl a apply that scale and we can bring it up and then we can hit Auto keyframing and hit g0 and then we can come to frame 40 and hit g z and then just bring that down and then in the timeline right click and click interpolation mode and linear that will then make it fall and then we're just going to set it to in the simulation properties a dynamic paint brush add brush and then this area will be the canvas add canvas change the surface type to waves and then you can basically sculpt your splashes with this that is how I made the third View and then one of the last ones was that lovely kind of Honey viscous fluid looking simulation now that was actually not flu it either that was just a cloth one plane and it was flowing across the surface of the pieces so what we're going to do is we're just going to hit Ctrl s Ctrl shift s and then we're going to save this as a fourth file then we're going to delete that plane and what we're going to do is in solid view which by hitting Z and then clicking on solid then we will just take this sphere and just move it right here I'm going to shift d to duplicate it bring it out again and then hit shift d and bring one really low and kind of in front of it and then just do that again shift d and this one right here we're just going to bring it like that and we're just going to scale it on the x-axis like this so that it has more area and I'm just doing these to build kind of steps for cloth to fall on and we want to frame them around the view of the camera a little bit just so that we can guide the fabric I almost want these to be like this and we're going to remove any Dynamic paint brushes from all of these that I forgot to do before we started working so be sure to do that and get rid of your particle systems on these alrighty there we go next we're going to bring that camera in because we're going to want to be really close to this then we're gonna come out of that view hit shift a plane scale it up Ctrl a scale tab I'm just going to right click and subdivide it a few times it's a good start and we're going to scale it up again and then subdivide it one more time now we're going to rotate it on the X so it's got kind of this curve and we're just going to move it up and then these need to all be Collision objects so if we come down here and click on this we can just snag all of these as a collision probably would have been smart to do this before duplicating all the Spheres but we're working as we're adding out the bubble though and then if we hit what oh yes also hit a and then hit A and B timeline area and then hit delete to delete any keyframes that should fix everything then we select this call it a cloth I just hit tab to see what happens we have something interacting oh we have a cube hidden here so let's take this and just delete that as well and then we should be able to simulate that cloth correctly now now that looks really good I want to bring this guy just a little bit forward because I liked how that cloth was bending let's see how it does it again that looks nice yes that's perfect then we're going to right click and shade smooth now the way we get that milky smooth viscous look is we just slow the clothsome down to 0.15 of its original speed and if we hit play again it's going to be really slow we can bring the simulation cache up to like 500 or 600. and then it will just keep simulating and let's just bake it to be faster once it's baked out then when you click you can see that it will take a bit let's just bring this end out and zoom out with our wheel and now we can see if you're close you can see how it would flow similar to a viscous layered fluid so now the trick is we just shade it smooth and then hit Ctrl 1 to add a subdivision surface to it and then we're just going to add a solidify and take the offset now we want to keep the offset of negative one so leave it as it is thickness that's fine I'm going to bring this up before the subdivision and then we should be able to see a nice flowy view in our camera and that is super cool if we then add the glass material to it although we cannot see a ton right now we can see if we move our Point light One Direction or the other we might be able to highlight some of these curves a bit better and then if we hit shift a at a second every light hit gz and just make it big very gigantic kind of thing maybe not that bright though 500 but I kind of want to bounce it off of one of these planes and remember this plane is still reflecting light which is really good for us so then we can see that it may bounce off of that instead of directly hitting the cloth alrighty now that we can kind of see the movement of the cloth I don't like seeing this so we're just going to bring that camera in just a bit further and just a bit lower than the last Secret Sauce to this is adding a particle system again so I'm going to go hair faces this time leave it at a thousand then hit object instance object and select bubble now we've got a gajillion bubbles so let's just bring their massive size down something reasonable and change the score and a miss to 0.8 and then just play with that size now one thing we do want to know is we do not want them showing on the outside face or it will look like the bubbles are outside of it and air bubbles can exist like they look like in water unless they're in water and so we just want them to show up on the other side of the face so we can fix that by changing this offset to one and then we can also tell it to follow the modifier stack and then if we select it on the vertices we can get a different result but we just need to scale these down 0.01 is as small as it will go then all we need to do is increase that thickness it might take some adjustment and as you can see it's not perfect the first time let's just see what some of these other settings do that is exactly what I wanted everything on the back face so face is random without using the modifier stack and I'll show up on the back but we won't see the back and so we go into this view they look like they're inside of it and as it flows we can get a nice gradient like that we can also try scaling the different radius of this light and moving it I really like what it's doing right here having that bottom lit kind of accentuates those curves since we have Auto keyframing on we accidentally moved the light so I'm just going to delete that first keyframe because we want it down there sweet okay that is how I made all of these shots with the fluid and so hopefully these were helpful methods and the last step would be to render so we're just going to come in here we're going to set file format to PNG eight delete the compression select a good folder and then we can make sure we're at 24 frames a second 1080p you can double that to 200 if you want to render 4K but I recommend staying at 1080P and then in here I render with 300 Max samples at a noise threshold of 0.01 GPU Cycles don't change your light paths lower than 12 because this is using glass to render and I use these settings for all of them one of the things you can do is check persistent data and that will ensure that all of the data that is cached can be used for the next frame saving you a lot of Foreigner time then we're going to just change our color management look to medium high contrast and we can start rendering I want to find a frame that I like first before so let's start at frame 300. and then we can render that out and just hit render render animation and then as you can see we get some sweet flowy fluids in this specific shot I did find it was good to turn the motion blur down to 0.02 just to reduce the amount of motion blur that was happening in each frame because they appeared blurry just because of how much motion blur there was even though they're moving fairly slowly because of the camera so close to them so I would recommend doing that all right I hope that tutorial was useful for you guys I hope that it helped you guys get some ideas of how you might approach a problem that a client presents to you creatively inside of blender because sometimes the obvious solution isn't always the right solution like fluid Sim versus cloth Sim Dynamic canvas versus real fluid Sim so there's a lot of options hopefully that helped you a lot if you guys make something really cool with this tutorial post it on Instagram tag me and I'll repost it because I'm excited to see what you guys are going to make also next week I'm going to be creating a tutorial on my photo scans workflow using my iPhone to take images in polycam with for free and how to get credits to do that for free and then how to take them into blender clean them up and make them look very high quality so if you're excited for that next Friday check that out on my Channel at eight o'clock other than that thank you so much to all the new people that have found me on Instagram and YouTube you guys support is much appreciated and as always create more than you consume foreign [Music]

Channel: Owen Jenkins

Views: 63,013

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Id: 34pqDXd1CTU

Length: 37min 25sec (2245 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 07 2023