Tuesday 19 December 2017

Minor Project: Experimenting with Bifrost

As I move on to some other parts of my poem, I wanted to experiment with Bifrost which is used to simulate liquid. This is for the phrase when I see hospitals I smell bleach. I'm still unsure how I'm going to create bleach and if I want it a liquid simulation or not, but I felt it'd be good to at least play around with it. One problem I found using the Bifrost system is that it does not appear to have a method of moving the liquid like how nparticles do with fields or a locator.

First I tried creating a sphere and set it to be an accelerator to try to get the liquid to follow the sphere. While this sort of worked, it was very difficult to control the results and I suspect this may not be the correct use of the accelerator setting.


I then tried to create a sphere and connected it to the liquid as a collider so it would act as a shell/container for the liquid. In this case, I animated the sphere hoping it would affect the liquid inside. However, I found this method would probably look similar if I just created a sphere, added the correct shader to it, and deformed it. It had no real added details in the animation, although this could be just due to the settings I had. 


Lastly I created a liquid then a significantly larger sphere surrounding it. I then made this sphere a collider and changed some settings so no liquid would leak through. I found this to be the most successful so far, but I found actually getting a detailed animation out of it caused my computer to slow down drastically and would make the mesh (once I turned off the particles and activated the bifrost mesh) very dense. Even with the mesh being dense, I didn't feel it had the details I wanted but again I suspect that is due to the settings that I had. In this test I also experimented with exporting the mesh out using an alembic cache to see if that would improve performance and give me greater control over the appearance of the liquid in regards to the material/shader.




I'm not sure how I like these experiments, but I did not expect Bifrost to be easy. It may be worth experimenting some more, but I'm unsure if it is even possible to achieve what I want using this method. I may experiment more with deformers, lighting and displacement map animation to see if I can fake the appearance of liquid bleach, but I also know that it wouldn't have as much detail as a proper liquid simulation. Below are some examples of the sort of liquid simulations I'd like to try to achieve, but I do not know how to achieve this in Maya.



1 comment:

  1. Something for you!

    https://www.itsnicethat.com/articles/simon-christoph-krenn-parasitic-endeavours-animation-181217?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+itsnicethat%2FSlXC+%28It%27s+Nice+That%29

    ReplyDelete