CoP 3: Even More Practical Work

After all the smoke simulations I've done I decided to go back to liquid simulations because I thought that I could get more character elements out of it due to the fact that for me it is easier to control the particles. For this simulation I wanted to have some sort of disaster feel to it like in films such as 'Day After Tomorrow' or 'Battleship', so I created a stairwell with windows and then had a liquid simulation burst through the windows. For this I wanted to make it as realistic as possible so I made the stairwell as normal and then shrunk it down to about 0.1cm from 50cm, so that when I come to use the bifrost system it simulates at a small scale and then when it's simulated I can scale it back up and without the scene loosing any resolution. Doing this fixes the gloopy problem I was having before with my first liquid simulation because I've take the gravity field within bifrost into consideration so that when I shrunk the model to 0.1, the gravity within bifrost doesn't need changing because its pre set to 9.8 meters per second, which means that the 0.1 scale model is now at the right measurements for bifrost to work realistically. 

I did two different simulations to test out how the liquid would move and act in the environment that surrounds it. One was where I had about 10 million particles in the simulation and the other was where I had about half of that so 5 million particles. I found that having less particles in the simulation actually had more effect than the bigger simulation because with the bigger simulation it just looked like the liquid was too linear and didn't have much movement and character element in it. Where as the simulation that had 5 million particles in it had more space to move about in the environment which gives the crashing wave a more dramatic effect and gives it a characteristic element.     

I then gave the particles a mesh and textured the mesh so that it looks more like water and so I could see how it would look as an object and how it would react to light.