I’ve been asked to quote a new project that would entail creating an effect like a firehose splashing off of an image, like spraying a mural or side of a building etc. I’m confident of doing it via Realflow and Vray, but wondering if it’s possible to render this with KT? I could probably get way cooler spray/mist effects but not sure if I can get the main stream and larger splashes to show the refracted background. This would just be a still image.
I have been experimenting and can create the basic flow of particles I need, but I am not sure if I can get KT to render transparent and refractive materials and pickup background imagery through it? Is this possible? I’ve also been through the docs but can’t seem to find it/figure it out.
You cannot render refractions. You can only apply environment reflection maps.
I wouldn’t do any water that has to look transparent, but we have seen non-transparent sprays done with it - check out the hilarious Rubberduckzilla ad here : youtube.com/watch?v=Rl9CQuAWhLM
The fire hydrants around the end were done with Krakatoa.
In general, we try to mix VRay rendered isosurface simulated using our fluid simulation (or Realflow in your case) with finer mist from Krakatoa. They are complementary and not exclusive.
The non-transparent sprays look great (and much more like a real firehose anyway). I have a test already looking pretty good for that too, but I think the clients will want something more transparent where it impacts the wall. I figured I might have to mix and match with Vray, but I thought I might have a quicker solution with KT (I only have a limited license of Realflow (2 cores) so sims are fairly slow. Because of that, and because I do stills only I tend to be fairly coarse with my Realflow work and polish it up via sculpting in Zbrush etc. However for this I really need more dynamic splashing etc.)
Thanks again for the help. I put in an email to order my license of KT btw. I will try not to be too much of a pest around here
b
ps Do you guys have plans to release your fluid sim software? I recall hearing something about that, or maybe that was just some wishful thinking circulating the net?
We have never made any announcements regarding the actual fluid simulator. We had a separate product called Flood:Surf based on Jerry Tessendorf’s paper for creating large ocean surfaces, but it never came out of Beta for various reasons.
I am not aware of any plans for making Flood a commercial product, but these things can change.
