Blender 2.7x “Jumping the Shark” OpenGL Viewport Fluid FX

Bart · January 20, 2016

Realtime OpenGL? Mind=blown.

cfirwin3 writes:

Testing out some OpenGL viewport rendering with the Ocean Modifier, Dynamic Paint, Particles, complex materials (from nodes) and a little post-process compositing.

Author Bart

I have a LONG history with Blender - I wrote some of the earliest Blender tutorials, worked for Not a Number and helped run the crowdfunding campaign that open sourced Blender (the first one on the internet!). I founded BlenderNation in 2006 and have been editing it every single day since then ;-) I also run the Blender Artists forum and I'm Community Lead at n8n.

8 responses

Steve

20 January 2016 at 16:12

Woah! Main thing I want to know is if the spray particles are dynamically generated or just the foam texture.

Bart
20 January 2016 at 16:45
I have invited cfirwin3 over to answer that.
Reply
1. Steve
  20 January 2016 at 18:10
  Nice! its one of if not the best splash effect I’ve seen with blender :)
  Reply
  1. dgdfgdf
    20 January 2016 at 20:39
    I agree, and I’ve seen a lot of these
    Reply
2. John Hamilton
  21 January 2016 at 02:33
  Hay Bart Don’t know if you know but cfirwin3 upload a video answering them. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pXlWc4-pbLg
  Reply
Carl
21 January 2016 at 02:20
Hey guys.
I put up a Q&A video about this animation here:
http://tinyurl.com/zb7568u
The answers to your questions, in short, are:
– No, the particles are not dynamically generated (I tried… but in the end, some good old fashioned, well-placed emitters were needed).
– The textures and materials are quite complex, but they can be previewed from the viewport in real time… but… the animation is so complex with respect to geometry and computation of dynamic systems (ocean modifier + dynamic paint + particles) that it does not play back in real time on my system (dual core, couple gigs of ram… very low by today’s standards). It runs very slowly… at about 1/8 speed when it’s the only thing running.
– The splashes are solid particles that are improved upon with a masking/overlay compositing trick in the VSE.
– All textures and materials are shadeless. The lighting effects are achieved with various blend modes and normal-applied ‘matcap’ type textures in the material slots and node editor. I did this to improve render time and preview speed (OpenGL lighting can slow everything down, especially with complex geometry and materials).
– I’m not an animator and have clearly spent very little time learning the art form. I just figured that a shark in a water tank would be a better demo than a sphere on a plane.
Thanks for all the kind words
-Carl
Reply
1. futurehack
  23 January 2016 at 19:50
  Hi Carl – Interesting project. I’ve a well spec’d i7 / 64 gig / 3xTitan rig and could benchmark the file for you if you’d like. Just let me know.
  Reply