Fluids

Ive been looking into other methods and one that stuck out was using maya fluids. I have been researching using the internet but also purchased a book called Mastering Autodesk Maya 2011 by Eric Keller which has a lot of good information about fluids.

Maya fluids uses emitters and containers to emit a fluid or particles that is bounded by the container.

I started by trying to test out the fluids by creating a 3D container and adding a emitter to it. I then adjusted the settings to make the particles dense so that they would look more like liquid than a gas. I played around for a long time and kept tweaking the settings to get the desired effect. The first problem that I ran into was that the particles kept going upwards. I managed to rectify this by adding a gravity field so that they would move downwards and look heavy, in the same way that water does.

It took a long time to keep tweaking the settings and replaying the animation because every time I tweaked, I had to re-simulate the animation. When simulating, you cannot start playing from say frame 100 because then the simulation will only start from there. You have to play from the beginning to make the simulation play correctly.

I quickly realised that my computer could not cope with fluids and it took an hour just to simulate 100 frames.

I tried other techniques to get the simulation to quicken such as changing the animation settings to play every frame and even tried to bake the simulation so I could at least play it back once to see what it looked like but this did not work either. Eventually my computer and Maya just kept crashing after about 150 frames and slowed my workflow down to a snails pace.

This was the last frame that I ended up rendering as I had no hope of waiting for more frames to simulate.

There are multiple problems with this:
1. It looks more like smoke than water
2. It is still not dense enough
3. It takes far too long to simulate and render
4. It uses an emitter which is going to be hard to incorporate into the scene
5. To get the emitter to fill the container enough to make it look like a river would take far too long.

I tried to tweak the settings a little bit more by changing the colour to an obvious blue and making the container really small so that I could get at least an idea of what it could look like. This did not work either as Maya just crashed and now would hardly simulate 50 frames.

Knowing there was an obvious problem with this, I tried to see if it was the software of hardware that was making it crash. I did a fresh install of Maya and even tried to upgrade to 2012 but the out come was always the same - Maya would slow down and eventually crash.

I have decided to scrap this idea as even if we could get it to look convincing, it would take days if not weeks to render just still water let alone something passing through it. I could not even get to test the scene with something passing through it as the test would probably not be able to render on my computer at all. It would take far too long and too much hassle to keep tweaking to get it perfect and then talk hours upon hours to render, which we would have to use the render farm for before we even see a small amount of results. Maya fluids is just not something we have the power or time to be able to use for this project.

I have had a couple more ideas of how to get convincing water. I am going to look into something called realflow. It allows your to create water and movement within water. It is used within the industry and seems to give some really realistic effects (Here are some examples of it in action:
http://www.realflow.com/rf_casestudies_portal.php)

Back to the drawing board...