In the first chapter, we’ll go over the Scene Tree and how to set up a Realflow scene. This includes how to get a Mesher, different types of Emitters, different types of daemons: a Circle Emitter, a Mesher, and a Gravity Daemon.
In chapter two, we’ll get into a more specific workflow and how to create a Crown Splash. We’ll make a drop that will hit some water. We’ll start off using a circle just to set up the scene that’s appropriate for a Crown Splash and tweak the Crown Splash daemon, editing its shape and timing to make it look really nice.
In the third chapter, we’ll go into the Image Emitter. We’ll start off by using some procedural shaders, such as a checkerboard or a sunburst, or different types of noise to generate an alpha to show where our fluid will take place. We’ll also learn a neat trick with lettering using the spline shader.
In chapter four, we’ll look at Splines and how to use those to generate fluids. Both as a drip – such as off of a rope or clothing line – and as well as a water path in the air, such as you see in soda commercials and gravy commercials.
In chapter five, we’ll go into Vertex Map. The Mesher has a channel manager that creates different vertex maps based on X, Y, and Z position. It can also be set up to create a gray-value depending on the speed of your mesh. This can be combined with a colorizer and Vertex Map Shaders to create elaborate and unique material effects. Lastly, we’ll go over how to set up your materials. Most of the other tricks in Realflow are for figuring out how to get the particles and mesh to simulate the way you want, and I’ll show you some of my personal tricks for creating subsurface materials, some caustics, some ray-tracing, and to get motion blur to make the most of your simulation.
Chapter 1: Scene Tree
b. Creating an emitter, mesher and gravity daemon
c. Creating a collider object with the collider tag
d. Kill-age, kill-isolated and kill-volume daemons to delete superfluous particles to maximize calculation power
Chapter 2: Crown Splash
b. Create and use “initial state” to start at a more natural/presimulated state
c. Placeing and editing the crown daemon, including splash shape, number of spikes and timing
d. Adding a few kill daemons to steamline our scene
Chapter 3: Image Emitter
b. Using the image emitter to create text, then melting it and setting up a test render
Chapter 4: Splines
b. Adding a Drag daemon and Sheeter daemon to modify the fluids behavior
c. Using the D-spline daemon to make our fluid travel along a spline
Chapter 5: Vertex Maps
b. Adding one of the vertex maps to a colorizer we can create the impression of two colors paints blending together
Chapter 6: Materials
b. Setting up a refractive material with caustics
c. Setting up motion blur
About The Instructor
After studying film and sculpture at the San Francisco Art Institute, Greg Kulz began working full-time as an artist in the SF Bay Area. Always interested in experimenting with new techniques and methods, Greg turned to 3D motion graphics as his new medium in 2001. Since that time, he has worked on such projects as the Team America and WWE video games, Ironman, various short films and a number of product modeling contracts for corporate clients including Sony, Panasonic and Frito-Lay. Greg’s first love remains character creation, but he also enjoys working with motion graphics, texturing, and modeling.
