Excuse me if the question is silly but I’d like to know if it would be possible to artificially thickening the edge of a frost mesh created from a RF sim. I’m working on a Splash and try to fake the lip(round edge) you can see on watersplash closeup shots.
Without seeing a screenshot, I am not sure what we are talking about, but there are two approaches to manipulating Frost meshes - changing particle data before meshing and changing the mesh after that. And there is a mixture of the two where you might generate some data before meshing that affects the meshing deformations afterwards…
Here some thoughts:
*Let’s say that you are meshing RF particles not directly, but you are loading them via the PRT Loader of Krakatoa (the free evaluation install would be enough). Frost supports a Radius channel which you could provide via a Magma modifier on top of the PRT Loader, especially if you know which particles are the ones you want to effect. I am not sure if the data is in the BIN file, but assuming it is, you could vary the size of your particles and produce variable meshing based on that.
*The Frost mesh can obviously be affected by any Max modifiers, typically a Relax modifier is what is most useful, but there might be more that would be helpful to achieve the look, and we also sell Genome that can be used to create new deformation modifiers.
Relax supports selections, the problem is to select exactly the areas you want relaxed and leave the areas you want unaffected unselected. This is where the mixture of data channel editing and post-meshing modifiers comes into play - you could set a Mapping channel in your particles before meshing them that represents the areas you want affected as [1,1,1] and the areas to leave unmodified as [0,0,0]. The Mesh will preserve this data and you can then add a Vol.Select modifier, drop a Vertex Color Map into it and get a selection where you want it and relax or otherwise modify the mesh. Again, this assumes that the particles whose mesh has to be affected are somehow easy to determine based on some channel…
There are just some general ideas.
Some more information would be useful to figure out whether there is a solution to your problem…
Thanks bobo for the quick reply and sorry for not visiting this thread sooner.
What I mean is in macro photography of crownsplashes for example
Example 2
Example 3
Example 3
There is a round part (lip) at the edge. Since this effect is not something which is simulated inside of realflow without scripts I was thinking about maybe “faking/adding” this effect during the mesh process. (If that is possible)
My idea was that since the sheeting (thinning out) of the rest of the fluid isn’t necessarily something that happens automatically either, you could apply Relax to the whole body of fluid EXCEPT the lip (assuming some channel in the simulation gives you the information what particles belong to which part). The relax would produce the thinner rest, and the round parts will remain as they were originally meshed. Is there a channel that informs you what is the leading edge? In Naiad for example there was a channel called Droplet that provided information about the probability for a particle to be in the process of detaching from the main fluid. That could be used to process particles as foam/droplets. I am not a RF user myself, is there anything similar in RF?
Thanks Bobo,
as far as I am aware there is no such channel (Maybe the neighbor channel), but as soon as I get back to work I’lll check double check it. I really appreciate your effort to help me.
Still not in front of my work pc but I rechecked the channel info and indeed the neighbor channel counts surrounding particles. I take it that I could create a function with magma that “selects” particle if the surrounding particles are less than a given number? (Sorry not having much Krakatoa experience)