Getting Started with FLIP Fluids Addon: Comprehensive Guide for Blender 3.x and FLIP Fluids 1.7.x

[Music] hello and welcome to the how to get started video this is an updated version because we are now at a newer version of blender and the newer version of the fliploids add-on for blender and yes so there are now different ways to get the add-on you can take a look to our buy page on our home page then you will find a free demo version then there are three links to the blender Market Gum Road or flip normals actually there's a summer sale on flip normals so this is um your chance to get the add-on for 30 off the regular price I'm going to explain the full installation process using my blender market account so if you click on buy you will automatically be redirected to the blender Market page actually we have the version 170 with some really amazing new features and once you have all of this you will find some downloads and there are some downloadable files so what you need to do here is of course you need to download the add-on itself the mixbox plugin the add-on presets here what are assets you can use in the assets browser from blender the blender Foundation just released version 360 of the amazing blender and let's go to installing the add-on here so what you need to do is go to edit preferences then have a look to add-ons on the left side go to install and then you need to go to your download folder where we just downloaded all files we are looking for to work with the add-on itself the stable version and when this is selected click on install add-on it will take just a small while and then you will see that this is available here if you cannot see it directly here just type in flip in the search field and then you will find it here and of course you need to activate this checkbox here and when you do this take a look to the right side into your tools because then you will see that there is a new tool coming into that is the flip fluids tool so here's an information click here to complete installation of the flip fluids add-on so click this one and that is done this is new in all our versions it was required to restart blender to finish the installation process but now this works with this button what is amazing then there are other things we need to do so let's open the preferences panel here and scroll down here to take a look what we have here something what is new what you will love is enable tablet domain settings I can show you if we are going to create a domain letter but let's scroll down here and then you will find some interesting things as example we can install mixbox and to be able to install mixbox we need to enable the developers tools because there are some features inside the add-on that are in an ongoing development phase you can use this as there are no limits but maybe you will find some bugs so maybe you're missing something this is why some features are only available when this checkbox is enabled and if this is enabled you can install the mixbox plugin click on install mixbox plugin and then go back to your downloads folder and then click the install button and then you will see it has been installed amazing is that you have a small mixbox test field here with some colors to show you how mixbox is working so the original color mixing inside blender was working in the RGB way you can see the blue color in the yellow color color and of course in real world we're mixing these two colors you will have green on the middle what was not possible using RGB mixing but with our mixbox plugin you will see this is a natural way of color mixing so this is amazing mix boxes installed and if you would like to know how to use mixbox exactly I will link mixbox tutorial in the video description and if you would like to install our new assets you can scroll down here to this install preset scene Library the first thing is we need to select an install location so by clicking on this folder and we do not need to create an Excel folder because the assets will create a folder for us so just click on accept and then we can click on insert preset scene library and then again in the downloads folder you will find the add-on presets package here just click on install and then you will see an information that it has been installed and then you will find that the flip Roots addon presence has been installed in this folder and yeah there are all the blend files inside so what means as example from the fire water example you can see on YouTube you can open the complete scene here also with other presets the other thing is that you will find the Assets Now on the asset browser okay I will do that later on but if you would like to check some information about the assets I will also add a link into the video description there are some more helpful links or example series tutorial and learning resources everything you can click and it will be opened in the internet browser they are really interesting things here beginner friendly mode is something you could check display document links in the UE will have to find some links direct links to help settings and uh let's have a look to this enabled tablet setting here so let's create a domain box you could create one just by click clicking on create domain and yeah we have a domain box here what is fantastic you will find we have a helper menu here what is not the simulation engine itself it's a collection of buttons and operations that will do things automatically that you would normally find in the domain settings panel here I will keep that open because we will work all the time with it however if you cannot see this here you can disable and enable The Thing by pressing the N key on your keyboard the most interesting settings will be found here things like the resolution yeah multi-threading is another thing we could talk about yeah maybe in another video the cache directory all the things that are important are here too let's have a deeper look into the flip fluids itself so as you can see you will find this in the physics properties panel that's of course the right location for this and if I would go to disable flip fluids you will see the default qpm and if I would go to enable this flip flute thing I would need to make this a domain box first so you can see all the settings again so this is the way this works we always have a hind here that this file has not been saved click on Save and then you can choose a folder where you would like to save your file and let's call this first steps as example and save the file and now the red text disappears and we are ready to do anything here okay let's go to have a deeper look into this thing here you can see there are many settings on the right side for the domain part so everything we are doing here is for the simulator we're setting up things here and when we hit bake this will be sent to our simulation engine and then the baked files will be loaded into the 3D viewport this is the way this thing works that means we have a lot of settings here the resolution we can switch between different simulation methods whenever you hold the mouse cursor above a field you will have some detailed information here whenever you hold the mouse over here you will learn what this field exactly is doing so we have the word scale here what uh says how big this domain would be in the real world let's think about the difference between a small object like a glass on a table what means it has to be less at meters we need centimeters and it would decrease as value here and then you will see some information about the word scaling here or it could also be a wave simulation on an on a big sea ocean something like this then you maybe would need to increase this here to have a realistic simulation this defines yeah how big the simulation is how fast the simulation is moving how much white water will be generated and something like this just some surface settings which is surface settings there are um yeah things like meshing against object sources add some details you will always have the chance to to take a look onto the online documentation however there's a lot of things here and that is something I would show you and we have that new tablet domain settings that will help you to have a better overview here when enabling this you will find all these things or the most of these things a very nice art in some tips something I really love this is absolutely new that comes with the latest add-on version 170 and give it a try okay so now we have this I think we could now start with a first simulation what do you think so the first simulation Coupe is so easy just by adding any object you would like let's have a look into the sphere here and General you would need to click on flip flips here then you would need to say let's say this is an inflow object and then you have an object that will image some fluid into your domain box you must be sure that this thing is inside the main box otherwise it will be ignored for simulation but another easier way is if you would go to add an object here uh you could also just click this inflow button in the help icon these things automate some things that you would do manually in the regular add-on settings here yes so we have our first simulation set up here we just need to click bake and then you can see a back process here in persons you will see how long it will take and if you go with the mouse cursor and um yes scrubs through the timeline here you will see the simulation but what you could also do is when you scroll down absolutely on auto load baked frames this is cool because that gives you a live feedback with our simulator so finished baked files will automatically be loaded and played back here in the speed of simulating if you press stop here and you press the play button you will see that this is working some faster here do we have a final surface display and a preview display and this is because if you're going to use a really really higher simulation that will slow down your viewport okay actually you see the red numbers here this is not 25 or 24 frames per second let's have a look to what I have set up I have 25 FPS and if I would like to have a faster playback I can use the preview mesh just by clicking this click the reload frame button here and then you will have a faster playback but with less the tiles of course there's also a way to set up with what resolutions is preview you and the final setting will be simulated so let me reset here and let's have a look to this resolution here so you will find this in the simulation settings too if your domain box is not selected because you are working in another part of your scene you could click set domain thing here and the help out on automatic detects the domain box and then you need to click this button here and have a look to simulation okay so simulation is enabled and you will find the grid resolution this is the same as you can see here it's connected as you can see here when open this panel here you will also find the preview resolution and we have a use recommend checkbox here because you always are going to use the half of the full resolution here but if this is something you do not want you can disable this box here and can choose your own recommends resolution here for the preview part of course there are more than just inflow objects you can also use some obstacles as well let's do this in a quick way 100 let me use recommend here let me add another object just to show you how this works and just to give you another hand click the obstacle button if you would like you can change some settings like friction as example so like this click bake and take a look to how this is working this obstacle is not the perfect obstacle for this simulator because there is no money for data this is really important to understand that your objects need to be watertight and that's a great way to check this with a 3D print add-on this is something that already comes with blender you just need to enable this using the add-ons panel here you can type in print then you will find this thing here just enable this and then you will find the 3D print check all button it's a 3D print panel and while your obstacle is selected click on check all and then you will find no money for the edges and some more things here so I click on cleanup make manifolds check all again and then this is great if this is modifying your obstacle object too much then you could do something like making a duplicate of your object of course after animating it if this is something you would like to do and then use the original object just for rendering so what means you can disable this eye here and just for rendering your original object will be visible and the simulation object that has been modified with the 3D print object can be hidden for rendering and just useful simulation part just as an information for you we often have some support requests because of some obstacles or some geometry is not working in the right way and in many cases it is because the objects are not watertight okay you can see some more things like the cache directory here and the blend render output the cache directory automatically will be relative to your file location and if you would like a render output you can click the set relative to blend file button here and then automatically you will have the fall over rendered files and then you can also click the set prefix as file name and this way with two clicks you will have a really great output directory and file naming here and if you would like to test some different simulation settings and would not like to overwrite the old simulation part you can click this increase version and then you will see that the cache directory will have an additional one and also the render output will have an additional one because this will be baked and rendered in a new folder okay there are more things like white water simulation you can enable this here everything except dust is enabled you can also use dust of course if this is enabled and I'm clicking bake you will see that our add-on is going to emit white water particles foam Bubbles and spray everything you need for a great looking simulation let's have a look to a rendered window I will also need to have a nice background of course you could now make a brighter background here using your word panel here I'm going to use the hdri maker okay now we have white water and we have fluid but everything is not really looking great this is because we are missing some shaders here what we could now do is we could go to the physics panels here while our surface is selected by the way our add-on generates flip-flid surface and all objects here in a collection let's go back to our helper add-on you can click that order nice outliner button here and then you will find out that we have some subcollections like domain where only the domain object in inside the obstacle everything is uh just ordered in a cool way here let's go back to our surface here as this is selected you can now select the surface material here from the drop down list you will find all the presets you remember you may be remember from first versions of the flip fluids add-on so you can select them from here and then automatically the surface become this and if you would like to see white water particles let's go to one of these white water things here and we'll find out that white water is visible as render display and for viewport display but we cannot see them here and this is because High particles in viewport is enabled here this is important because if you have thousands or millions of white water particles this will slow down the viewport what you can do is now you can disable this checkbox here then you need to reload the frame and then now you can see that RH Dots here let me make the flip flute surface invisible and now you can see all that white water particles here so these are the bubbles thus is not enabled for simulation so they will see nothing here this is the foam and this is the prey spray particles you can now here select a different material too for form you can select foam for spray we should select spray foam should be foam and Bubbles should be bubbles if you would like to have a different particle size then you must take care because you can change it here but this will only be visible when clicking the reload frame button and this will change the size of all particles if you do not want this you can click on foam bubble spray dust button the high particles in viewport checkbox will automatically be enabled so I need to disable this again and then your particle scale will be set up for each kind of Whitewater simulation object separately always remember if you're going to change things here you need to reload the frame to be able to see the changes here okay so the foam particles are much too big let me decrease this to or two reload frame have a look yeah and then I can also enable the surface settings too okay so this is how this is looking like actually for the foam part I would say we could change the material just in the way how you set up shaders here just to make them a little better visible here if you would like to have a more beautiful surface of the simulated fluid surface you can take a look to the modifier tap because our add-on automatically adds a smooth modifier you can set it up here like this and then this will be more smooth here what is absolutely beautiful okay and then there is the assets browser now as I told you you will be able to find the new add-on presets here you can type something in the search field here like Shader as example and you'll find some interesting shaders here and yes these are the old icons from the old preset library and let's have a look to the Clearwater Shader you can just drag this on the surface here and then you have clear water here so or let's have a leg look to milk or something else some shaders have some little hands here I recommend to use a larger thumbnails here because then you can see that small Hinds here velocity and speed we'll see something this is for attributes we are going to make a tutorial about attributes for YouTube so you can see what this is for and how this is working and something else I would like to recommend is if you're going to render your finished setup scene you finish simulation and all things have been prepared for rendering then we recommend to use command line rendering this is not maybe not available for all operating systems what I can say is for Windows everything is working everything of what you can see in the command line tools will work on Windows correctly if I click generate batch file you will have a small noticium that a bench file has been generated and where you will find this batch file it's the folder we are we have saved our blend file itself and there's the window First Step split and if you are going to take a look into this file then you will see what it does it will run blender and render frame 1. if frame 1 has been rendered it goes to frame 2 and that will be repeated for all frames in the frame Edge you have set in blender if frame one and two and three and four already has been rendered and you would hit the generate batch file button then in this file here you would see this at the end of the day if baking and rendering has been finished and you will see that a missing two frames you just need to click the generate batch file button here and it will automatically take a look into how many frames has been rendered and what frames are missing and if rendering has been completed you can click this button here and it will open the folder that has been set up in the render output folder here so when I click on this of course this is actually empty because we did not render anything here what you can also do is you can use command line baking CMD baking means that you can close blender and the baking process will continue and what is cool is when there has a error for some reason CMD baking will automatically relaunch baking so how many times it will try to rerun the simulation can be set up in the flip fruits atom preferences okay the command line tools relaunch bake after a crash field Max attempts is what default set by five what means five times when using CMD biking baking will be tried to rerun and if you are using this you can also click the render after bake button that means if banking has been finished blender automatically will start with render all that big frames really cool and if you would like the maximum on stable rendering you could use the batch mode what means if baking has been completed the add-on automatically will previously generate batch file operator to generate a batch file and then start it automatically if you use this combination and click launch bake you can close blender and just wait drink a coffee sleep whatever I will come back to your PC you will see a rendered result how amazing is this okay so this is how to get started we see actual versions if you would like to have more information on our homepage there are some more information as example you can see the lower menu here and you can go to the documentation Ryan took a lot of time to make this documentation as complete as possible a link to the Complete Guide Series what is a link to our YouTube channel all information about different objects how influent outflow objects are working how you can work with our White Water simulation and this is increasing we are working on new tutorials and there's also from another channel of us the Creative Learning series what is less technical but more creative so here are some scenes we are working on together the slow motion how to make chocolate simulations how to work with web Maps another 10 tips video to improve your simulation so this is also a very great learning source if you have some questions or need support we have a support form on our webpage so we can also take a look to how you can set us an information your blend file your create requests you can use this formula to uh yes tell us about bugs or issues you found if you need some scene troubleshooting help or if you have a feature request or something like this you can use these fields we are collecting videos from our customers and making a really really cool uh cutted video from this you will find the result of this videos on our YouTube channel as well okay so that was all from how to get started in a new version I hope you have enjoyed this video if something is missing or if you have any questions of course you can type this in the comment Fields below and don't forget to click the Subscribe button to be up to date so thank you for watching and goodbye

Channel: FLIP Fluids

Views: 23,518

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Id: Hf2hviJhveU

Length: 26min 48sec (1608 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 29 2023