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So I'm looking into doing a bit of liquid work and wondering if it is possible to do, due to the way normals have to be in a liquid/glass scenario. Pretty much something like this:



It seems like you're going to need a pretty complicated control over the normals of the glass. Basically to swap normal directions based on if water is touching the glass or not. Or possibly an animated alpha map that is based on the interaction of the liquid and glass. even that would be quite complicated to do.

I could just be over thinking it right now but i really see now possible way to do this in maxwell and have the interactions of hte liquid and glass to look correct.

I did this here: http://maxwellrender.com/forum/viewtopi ... 22#p335622

Actually you just need to use a boolean operation to cut away the glass where the liquid is interfering. Then substract the glassshape from the liquid, leaving a merged mesh cutting off the liquids intersections with the glasses surfaces. This should pretty much cover it.

Looking forward to the results

I expect nothing less then mindblowing, Justin !

cheers

Aniki

Holy Sh** Aniki, you just killed my confidence in trying to do something like this! Once you said "boolean" my mind melted. What software did you do your animation in? I work in Maya, so I definitely do not have faith in Maya's boolean capabilities to create something like you did. Maya's booleans tend to be a crap shoot, at best...sometimes they work, sometimes they don't, and it tends to have no rhyme or reason on either side. I feel like I'm gonna have to learn a new 3d software enough just to do this.

This was always a crippling issue for me with Maxwell too (for pours and things like water drops/condensation). Maxwell does dielectrics and caustics sooo well, but the way the interfaces work is just too hard to work around on complex surfaces, at least it has been for me.

/b

Hey Justin, you're welcome

for the boolean part I use Cinema 4D, which is as far as I heard from friends one of the best in case of boolean stuff. I use to do boolean work for them from time to time as you said, maya is unusable ( at least the basic core functions, maybe there are sophisticated plugins for this...), 3dsmax is hell slow, and not really better than maya, besides using plugins as well, dont know on these though. Finally XSI has shaderbased options working in mental ray "only".

let me know if theres something I can do for you you plan to do an animation or still ?

cheers

Aniki

is it possible to use animated textures when using maxwell plugins? Doing that, I think using an animated alpha map that is applied to the interior of the glass which is based on the interaction of the liquid and glass, would work. but I don't know if maxwell can handle anything animated.

I doubt that, as maxwell really needs the polygons to be removed. Animated Alphamaps could work, depends on the plugin and exporting process I suppose..

How would it work to alpha the glass? I must be missing something, but to me alphas work to create transparent (invisible) sections parallel to the normals so I can't envision how it would help an intersection problem?

/b

well, that was your idea

simmsimaging wrote: Doing that, I think using an animated alpha map that is applied to the interior of the glass which is based on the interaction of the liquid and glass, would work.

I'd use the way Tom and Mihai suggested, cut the polygons away

Aniki wrote:well, that was your idea

simmsimaging wrote: Doing that, I think using an animated alpha map that is applied to the interior of the glass which is based on the interaction of the liquid and glass, would work.

I'd use the way Tom and Mihai suggested, cut the polygons away

Easier said than done with a few thousand water droplets that are all a couple of thousand polys

b

Also it would seem there is a fatal flaw in the integration between Realflow and Maxwell in that if you import Realflow particles and render direct in Maxwell you have no option for booleans.

I've not played with wetmaps, maybe that could serve as an opacity mask for the glass?

Best,
Jason.

simmsimaging wrote:

Aniki wrote:well, that was your idea

simmsimaging wrote: Doing that, I think using an animated alpha map that is applied to the interior of the glass which is based on the interaction of the liquid and glass, would work.

I'd use the way Tom and Mihai suggested, cut the polygons away

Easier said than done with a few thousand water droplets that are all a couple of thousand polys

b

hit me and I can try to boole it for you

Aniki wrote:
hit me and I can try to boole it for you

Thanks, but what I'd need is a workable in-house workflow so it's not really relevant if I can't do it here

time to install Cinema 4D then or any other package thats good at handling complex boolean ops ,)

Yeah, maybe I can hardly contain my excitement about having to spend another 1K and a thousand hours working out a new, complicated, (and since it is CG: probably error prone) piece to add to my pipeline!


/b