The fluid simulator now supports several features that produce much better looking simulations. The most important of these is its ability to internally perform isosurface subdivision on the fluid mesh. This works similar to applying a subsurf modifier on the fluid object, only it works much better and allows for some great-looking fluid particle features.
It can be found on the third page of the domain settings. A value of 1 means no subdivision, each increase results in one further subdivision of each fluid voxel. The resulting meshes thus quickly become large, and can require large amounts of disk space. Be careful in combination with large smoothing values - this can lead to long computation times due to the surface mesh generation.
Fluid particles have been substantially improved. In addition to the existing options to spawn normal blender particles, fluid particles can now create new geometry inside the fluid mesh. The particles make use of the new isosurface subdivision options, so surface subdiv must be greater then 1 for this feature to work.
Fluid simulations can look much nicer with this option, as it allows having lots of water droplets without requiring a large domain resolution. Note that the particles are only included in the final surface mesh, not the preview surface mode. The preview mode won't show them.
Click below to download the .blend used for the above images.
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The test .blend used to create the above images. |
Inflow, outflow, and fluid objects now work with deformed objects, such as an object following a path, or an object with an armature. To enable support for this, toggle the "Animated Mesh: Export" option in the inflow panel. Note that there's no need to use this option for simple IPO location/rotation/size keyframing.
