madfishsam opened this issue on Mar 26, 2007 ยท 16 posts
forester posted Tue, 27 March 2007 at 5:43 PM
No, in Truespace, not hard to do at all. You just need a little bit of an eye for water - something most people have. In Truespace, you have an emitter, and some metablobs and you can add some simple gravity or wind. That's pretty much it. So, you just play around until you get something that takes the general shape you were hopeing for. You keep the final "water" away from the emitter object, and then save the "water" as an *.obj file. Then you do whatever you want with that. Just dink around and experiment with it. Realflow, by contrast requires you to know some fairly exact things about liquid density, atmospheric pressures, the force of gravity, various kinds of pressures (for the emitter, for internal liquid dynamics), surface tensions, and we have not even started discussing the various forces that can shape a liquid through time. Building a mesh is also another entire subject to master. The current version of Realflow (Version 4) has a more simple under-interface, one that is easier to understand. But somewhere around Version 2 and 3, I counted 1500 individual parameters to master. I believe these and more are still within Realflow, but they are organized in a better way than the earlier versions. On the other hand, if you want to build a mesh where a waterfall of certain physical properties is impacting a waterbody (pond or river or ocean) of other physical properties, and you also want a wind blowing at a certain velocity across that water body, you can't beat Realflow for its physical accuracy is constructing the splash that is occuring at the point of impact. Absolutely magnificent physical dynamics!