Physical simulations are cool, most of us in vfx think so anyway. Once you know the basics of how to set them up in a software package, you could spend hours watching them tick along, doing randomly cool things. What's tough is making simulations do what you need for a shot. It isn't good enough that the results look damn sweet, but they have to look damn sweet while doing what the agency approved in the boards. It's all about control, making the sim do what you need it to. And that's what this course is about. These lessons will go thru a range of common needs in production and teach you how to control the simulations. Along the way we'll also nail most of the common problems that artists run into with RealFlow.
Professor Mark Stasiuk's company, Fusion CI Studios, specializes in creating photo-real fluid visual effects and setting up particle pipelines for companies who wish to do the same.
For this fxphd course, Stasiuk will be using RealFlow, a tool he knows intricately, to work through how to achieve great particle and other dynamic effects. He'll be examining filmed references of fluids in order to learn how to create an accurate and realistic result in the app
class syllabus
Class 1: Goo Spew: All about RealFlow emitters. No, they don't work like standard particle emitters! This lesson covers conceptual theory to help you understand emitters and so be able to decipher common problems in your simulation scenes. We'll go thru a series of emitters and the meaning of their settings, what they are good for, pitfalls and workarounds. The lesson will also take you thru a variety of RealFlow's interface features, to make sure you know your way around the software.
Class 2: Daemons are your angels in fluid simulations, you use them to push, pull and sculpt fluids -- as well as rigid bodies -- to fit with the director's vision. In this lesson we'll go thru a simple project of filling up a container with water, settling it, and then making the fluid "dance" and pour out of the bottle into a wine glass. This covers a series of very common needs in production, especially commercial work.
Class 3: Real projects usually involve fluids interacting with animated geometry, but getting this to work well is not as easy as it seems. We'll look at a seemingly simple scene example of an animated bottle carried, that illustrates some common issues with fast-moving geometry and various ways to get past the major issues. The methods include re-exporting scene geometry, altering substeps and fps settings to allow for fast motion, and removing translation channels in the animated geometry. We'll also have a brief look at another example, that of a car wheel splashing thru a puddle, to see another application of altering the fps and substeps of a simulation scene.
Class 4: In this class we will focus on pure rigid body dynamics. Rigid bodies are handled very efficiently in RealFlow, so it's worth understanding how to use it for when the right opportunity comes up in a project. We rig a basic car model to make it drive down a road, over a ramp jump and through a stack of barrels. The class covers the basics of constraints, the main rigid body dynamics settings, and workarounds to a few issues with the current version.
Class 5: Coupled fluid and rigid bodies: One of the coolest things that RealFlow does is handle "fully coupled" rigid body and fluid dynamics, so you can push objects around with fluid, and have the objects push back. This makes for truly rich, organic and natural results that can be very difficult to achieve with keyframed animation.
Class 6: This lesson dives into controlling your simulations using expressions -- something many artists avoid because it tends to get mathematical, to the detriment of their work. We'll build a fairly complex fountain simulation, with 12 mathematically choreographed water spouts. The spouts will be rigged to make their control simple and precise, so you don't have to spend your valuable time making tweaks to 36 separate curves. You will also be introduced to 4 different kinds of useful expressions that will serve you well into your simulation future.
Class 7: OK let's get some sims ready for rendering. We're good at making particles do cool things, now let's coat those clouds of dots with polys. This lesson will cover the ins and outs of meshing, so you can go from lumpy porridge to cheese to whisky. We'll go thru the various settings, and you'll find out what's most useful and what's not so much, plus get tips on workflow so you'll spend less of your time getting to the perfect mesh settings.
Class 8: Elastics: RealFlow simulates other kinds of fluids too, which are less common needs but when you need them, they're good to have. Here we'll do a set of simple simulations with elastics and their related cousin, soft bodies, to check out this squishy behavior and see it's limitations and potential uses.
Class 9: RealWave: Another useful simulation tool that comes with RealFlow is the fluid surface simulator called RealWave. This gets used often in production so it's worth knowing about. This class goes thru a small project involving rigid body dynamics and the surface of a lake, to illustrate a variety of RealWave features. Altho the project is small, this class is rather long as it covers many aspects of the project workflow, such as steps in determining the interaction settings, establishing what should be left in and out of interaction with the realwave, and also issues with realwaves and ideas on how to get around them.
Class 10: Basic Python Scripting for RealFlow: Python is the scripting language of RealFlow and, where production is concerned, this is where you get supreme control. Ten lessons could easily be devoted just to scripting applications but we'll dive in with a fairly simple project where we'll build a generally useful scripted tool (a batch script for identifying object vertices), and also apply scripting to a specialized application to cause melting when a part of an object approaches a frozen fluid.
Homepage: http://fxphd.com/fxphd/courseDetails.php?idCourse=136
![FXPHD - RFL201: Particles and Dynamics using RealFlow [Reuploaded]](https://www.gfxtra31.com/uploads/posts/2014-03/1394438063_rfl2011.jpg)
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