Covering the week of January 20th – 24th, 2020.

This is Ryan with the week #5 development update!

Two Minute Papers: Is a Realistic Water Bubble Simulation Possible?

This was a very exciting week for us. Blender and the FLIP Fluids addon were feature in Károly Zsolnai-Fehér’s, Two Minute Papers YouTube channel. Two Minute Papers is a series that explain the latest and greatest research in a way that is understandable and enjoyable to everyone.

This episode covers the simulation method that we use in our whitewater feature. I am so excited to see one of my favourite YouTube channels explaining one of my favourite simulation papers!

The Unified Spray, Foam and Bubbles for Particle-Based Fluids paper described in the episode is one of my favourite papers due to how well written and in its simplicity in the method. Having a paper that was accessible to me as a beginner in simulation programming was insanely helpful when the FLIP Fluids simulator was in very early development.

Since this episode aired, we have been receiving a lot of attention! We had so many questions on social media and Reddit and I tried to answer as many as I could. It’s great to see many new users this week enjoying our FLIP Fluids addon. Thanks for the tremendous support!

Wetmap Testing

Created this test to see how wetmap generation can look on complex geometry such as a 3d scanned cliff face:

• Our FLIP Fluids + Wetmaps tutorial can be found here: Blender FLIP Fluids Learning Series #6 | Wetmaps
• I also really like this wetmap tutorial for CG Cookie Weekly which can be found here: Creating Realistic Wetmaps in Blender CGC Weekly #20
• The 3D scanned cliff face asset by 3drille can be found on the Blender Market here: Cliff Face Pack A Bundle
• The subtle drip/shimmer of the wetmap was created using the AutoFlow shader from the DeltaFlow Blender Market material pack: DeltaFlow

Hope to be able to create a nice river with 3dscanned assets and wetmaps for demonstration and workflow testing!

More Development Notes

• RedefineFX: Advanced Water Course Progress – 100% complete! As mentioned in earlier posts, the purpose of this course is to learn more about the Phoenix FD simulator. There are many cool features and tweaks we could make to the addon that I think could be realistic to add to the FLIP Fluids addon. I’ve kept detailed notes for this course, so I’ll need to make a post about this in the near future.
• Updated Documentation: Alembic Support – The Alembic Support document was a bit out of date and has been updated/reformatted for changes in Blender and to include some new info on use in a render farm.