First Pass

Welcome back! Last blog, I went over my general plan and my (really) rough storyboard. Now you can see the fruits of my labor!

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Swirl

I first worked on this swirling fluid effect. I followed this tutorial by CG Artist Academy to create it. The setup is quite simple. First, you create a Bezier curve. Then, you simulate particles on it and attach a pop curve force node to move it along the curve. You also add a popfluid node to make the particles act more fluid-like and a pop force node to add some noise and variation. Then you mesh the final outcome with a particle fluid surface node.

Forming

The next effect I was targeting was the forming of the wine vessel. I wanted to make it look like the fluids pooled together and formed the shape of the vessel. I followed this tutorial where Doxia Studio was trying to recreate the opening title sequence of Daredevil to create the effect. I will note that I spent an embarrassingly long amount of time trying to figure out how to make the fluids travel up instead of down, as it took me an hour or two to find where the gravity option was hiding. That being said, the video basically walks you through how to create a custom volume and then attract the particles to said volume. I recommend checking out the full video as he explains the process pretty in-depth.

First Impressions

So after that was all said and done, I took it in for review. I think the feedback was mostly positive! One thing I chose to do was make the fluids resemble wine, as it is a wine vessel. I was debating whether to make it clear, like rice wine, or color it a shade of purple/red, like grape or plum wine. I went with the latter, thinking that it would show up better. However, it was suggested that I instead make it rice wine for it to better fit the context, so that will be adjusted by the next blog. The other critique was continuity, and having the swirling fluid somehow connect the two shots together. The idea is to have the fluid come in from screen left, do a quick swirl upwards, ball up, then drop onto the ground, creating a big splash. Then, the splash will pool up and form the wine vessel. That is going to be a bit more work for me, but I think I have all the tools to make it happen, so hopefully that will be seen in the next update! Something I also want to add by the next update is transitioning from the fluid into the solid vessel, and I just might have an idea how to.

The basic plan is to rerun the fluid simulation; however, this time, changing the material of the fluid to a solid color. This way, I can take it into a video editing software and chroma key it out. Then, I will put the rendered wine vessel underneath that keyed-out render, and it should look like it is being materialized. I'm not sure how it will turn out, but by the next blog, we'll find out. I'll see you guys in the next one!