Rocky Progress

Hey! Welcome back to the next step of my ongoing fluid project. In the last blog, I went over my first pass of the two shots that I was working on for my final project. In this blog, I am going to go over how I connected the two shots, and also how I decided to comp the forming shot together

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New Transition

So last time I talked about how the water was going to be taking a new path of motion, almost spiraling upwards and then dropping down. Here is what I got for that.

I'm pretty happy with how the motion going upwards looks, but the look of it balling up and falling feels like it needs some adjustments. Here is the node setup I used for this shot:

I made use of the node activations to get certain nodes to activate when I wanted them to. For example, the attract node at the end of the curve would activate on frame 185, and then the gravity node would activate on frame 360. I would then deactivate whatever node was controlling it before, like the pop curve force, on those same frames. This is how I got the motion to come in segments.

Forming Comp

For the forming liquid, here is what I got with that.

To create this effect, I rendered out different versions of the simulation. In those versions, I changed the material of the liquid to be one solid color. I would then take those shots and use a chromakey in a compositing software, and that would reveal the real look underneath.

However, the look of the transition wasn't up to the standards that I was looking for. I don't know how to explain it, but it feels very amateur.

Feedback

That being said, there was one feedback that I keep getting, and that is to find references. Finding references would help ground what kind of look I would be going for. So off I went to scour the internet for liquid references. And, to be honest, I struggled really hard to find a good reference. I even resorted to using ChatGPT to help my search, and even then, I couldn't really find anything too useful. Maybe I was just looking in the wrong spot. If you have any great references, feel free to let me know! However, this is what I could find.

There was also something that I was told by someone else who was looking at my shot, and they asked what message I was trying to convey. To be honest, that thought didn't really cross my mind. I decided to do these shots just because I thought it looked cool. I realize now that maybe that line of thinking is too shallow. Maybe it is something that I will have to revisit.

Overall, while I think these shots have merit, I don't think I really like the direction I am taking them. So, in the next blog, I am going to take a step back and see what changes need to be made in order for this project to really sell.