Water and Viscous Simulation / Shader Building

For this project I wanted to focus on the look of the water and creating interesting splashes that you see everywhere such as water pouring into a glass or water flowing over a water fall and even simple splashes that water makes when it hit an interesting surface. So before doing this I had to research what this looked like.

When finding reference I had a hard time finding a water source that would continuously pour water so I kind of compiled different references to get a since of what I was trying to create.

Next I needed to know more about the shaders that houdini builds so I used houdini’s help docs to learn more about how the shaders work in houdini.

In my scene I first started with a bowl so that the water would flow into it but then I realized that it took away from the splashes I was trying to make so I created a grid and connected a mountain node to it to create a more interesting surface.

Then I created a Flip emitter from a Sphere just out of camera view. To connect the water to the surface I created a RDB solver for the surface and turned the volume collision off. In the AutoDop I tweaked some of the motion attributes for the water to create a better splash and to help match my references.

The Last step was to tweak the shader for the water and help create a more believable clear creek water I was going for. In the shader I was mostly experimenting with different values for the over all diffuse and the cloud density in the volume shader. 

For this project I wanted to focus on the look of the chocolate and creating interesting deformations that you see everywhere such as chocolate pouring over the bar flowing over an ice cream cone and even simple folds that chocolate makes when it hits an interesting surface. So before doing this I had to research what this looked like.

Next I needed to know more about the shaders that houdini builds so I used houdini’s help docs to learn more about how the shaders work in houdini.In my scene I first started with a bar so that the chocolate would flow onto it. I created a box above the bar and animated that moving over the bar. I then created a flip fluid emitter from the box and animated it’s activation to start and stop when I wanted. Next I selected the flip fluid and pressed “make viscous” this option then turned on all the viscous attributes through out the autodop network. After creating the initial fluid I then connected the geometry into the network making the bar and the ground an RBD so that they would interact with the particles. Next was the experimental part where I mostly went through step by step and attribute to attribute testing to get the right motion. I ended up adding stick on collision and also tweaking the viscosity to get the right look.

The Last step was to tweak the shader for the chocolate and help create a more believable melting chocolate I was going for. In the shader I was mostly experimenting with different values for the over all diffuse and the cloud density in the volume shader. Also I did some research on the reflection map and anisotropy settings to get a more diffused specular sheen.