FLIP Fluids 1.7.2 adds official compatibility support for Blender 4.0, a particle rendering feature set, bug fixes, and improvements.
Compatibility Notes:
FLIP Fluids 1.7.2 is officially supported in Blender 2.80 to Blender 4.0.
Blender 4.1: At this moment there are no known compatibility issues between this version of the FLIP Fluids addon and the latest daily build of Blender 4.1, but this may change as Blender 4.1 develops.
Added: Feature set to display and render fluid particles and fluid particle attributes (Documentation).
Fluid particle export settings can be found in a new Domain > FLIP Fluid Particles panel.
Options to adjust amount of particles to export, and whether to export surface, boundary, and interior particles.
Display and render options to set the amount of particles to display (Display Documentation).
Attribute support for all Surface attributes: Velocity, Speed, Vorticity, Color, Age, Lifetime, Whitewater Proximity, and Source ID (Attribute Documentation).
Built-in attributes for particle ID, and whether particles are a surface, boundary, or interior particles.
Added: Feature to generate a Lifetime attribute for the fluid surface (Documentation).
The Lifetime attribute allows the fluid to start with a lifetime value that counts down in seconds and once the lifetime reaches 0, the fluid is removed from the simulation. Each Inflow/Fluid object can be set to assign a starting lifetime to the generated fluid.
After baking, the lifetime remaining values can be accessed in a material or in Geometry Nodes with the name flip_lifetime
Added: Feature to generate a Whitewater Proximity attributes for the fluid surface (Documentation).
These attribute values represent the number of foam, bubble, or spray whitewater particles that are near a point on the surface and can be used in a material to shade parts of the surface that are near whitewater particles.
After baking, the proximity attribute can be accessed in a material or in Geometry Nodes with the names flip_foam_proximity, flip_bubble_proximity, and flip_spray_proximity.
Added: A Refresh Stats operator to the Domain > Stats panel. Useful for updating the stats if running a command line bake.
Change: Surface mesh generation can now be disabled in the Domain > Surface panel.
Change: Whitewater simulation mesh objects (whitewater_foam, whitewater_bubble, …) will no longer be removed from the scene after disabling the the Domain > Whitewater > Enable Whitewater Simulation option.
This is to prevent removing any important modifications that the artist has added to the object such as custom modifiers and materials.
These scene objects can be deleted manually or by using the Domain > Whitewater > Delete Whitewater Mesh Objects operator.
These changes also apply to settings that enabled/disable surface mesh generation or fluid particle export.
Change: The whitewater and fluid particle Geometry Nodes modifiers created when using the Initialize Motion Blur operator will now contain options for enabling/disabling motion blur and conversion to point clouds.
Note: This will only apply to new scenes created with FLIP Fluids 1.7.2 or later.
Removed: FLIP Fluids Preferences > Beginner Friendly Mode option. This UI mode ended up resulting in frequent confusion due to UI mismatch in tutorials and other learning material.
Bug Fix: Fixed errors that could be generated when switching tabs in the tabbed domain UI mode.
Bug Fix: Fixed issue where errors could halt addon functionality due to MacOS generated system files located in the cache directory.
Bug Fix: Fixed issue where stats could display incorrect data for the flip_viscosity attribute.
Bug Fix: Fixed error message that could prevent generating full Help > FLIP Fluids > Copy System & Blend Info data on older Blender versions or older MacOS versions.
Bug Fix: Fixed AttributeError that could be generated in older versions of Blender that are using Python 3.8.x or earlier.
Bug Fix: Changing topology warning will now only trigger when dynamic topology could affect the simulation. Notes:
Dynamic topology prevents the addon from being able to calculate the vertex velocities of the object. Sometimes vertex velocities are not needed and it can be okay for a FLIP object to have dynamic topology.
Obstacle objects should not have dynamic topology.
Force Field and Outflow objects are allowed to have dynamic topology.
Fluid and Inflow objects are allowed to have dynamic topology as long as the Add object velocity to Fluid/Inflow option is not enabled on the object.
Bug Fix: Added workaround to a Blender issue (#71908) that resulted in keyframed motion blur scale not to be applied during render.
Bug Fix: Fixed issue where the Domain > Stats > Cache Info > Start Frame could be displayed incorrectly after running a command line bake.
Bug Fix: Fixed std::length_error baking error that could be triggered if a FLIP type object was much larger than the domain object.
Note: It is okay for FLIP object to be larger than the domain, but it is not recommended to be very large compared to the domain (Documentation).
Bug Fix: Fixed UI issue where savestates list could be listed out of order (Issue #626).
Bug Fix: Fixed UI issue where the FLIP Fluids sidebar > Domain Resolution value would not be greyed out if the Domain > Simulation > Lock Voxel Size option is enabled.
Bug Fix: Fixed possible Domain > Stats > Cache Info > Mes Stats UI alignment issue.
Version 1.7.2 is here!
version 1.7.2 (Nov 07 2023)