6 Monsters

Floyd, Its very good. But me being in school and seeing water fountains all the time, you have to fix one thing. The water when it hits the fountain gives off alot of droplets in the “sink” part of it. Also, when the fountain turns off, your water appears to almost drop. Water fountains have the arcs like in your animation, but when the water goes down, the arch gets smaller and smaller until there is no water, but its done pretty quickly. Your animation has it where the arch almost appears to change shape and then fall. Just giving you some advice. Steve

Thanks for the insight. We’re still working on this, and the way the water turns off is one of the things that came up. The water does seem to break up a bit too much once it hits the sink part, splitting into many different particles rather than keeping it’s volume. We’re working on solving that as well.

Hey Guys…..
This test looks awesome!!!!!
It looks real. The reflections, fountain and water are done sooo well. Everything looks and feels natural.
I’m amazed!
Continued fun and I look forward to more!
Take care and talk soon!
Your Cartoon Pal…… Jeff

Thanks, Jeff. What we’re going for is a classic cartoon style of animation and design, but with semi realistic surfaces. The blog is proving to be a great way to fine tune things as we go.

I think it looks great! Is that all particle based? Pretty cool looking lil’ test… How long before we get to see some character animation?

Well, it is kind of particle based, but not really. First, we modeled the faucet and sink in Maya. We kick those out and import them into Real Flow. We run a particle simulation in Real Flow, setting up things like viscosity of the fluid, gravity, friction of the surface of the sink, etc. Real Flow then takes this particle cloud and wraps a mesh around it, making a surface. It does this for each frame of the animation. We bring these meshes back into Maya, frame by frame, and that becomes our water. As for the character animation, we’re beginning the rigging process on these characters this week. You should see some rough animation tests by the end of the week. Keep watching this space!