Blender how to make water

IntroductionпѓЃ

Liquid SimulationsпѓЃ

Fluid physics are used to simulate physical properties of liquids especially water. While creating a scene in Blender, certain objects can be marked to become a part of the fluid simulation. For a fluid simulation you have to have a domain to define the space that the simulation takes up. In the domain settings you will be able to define the global simulation parameters (such as viscosity and gravity).

Example of a liquid simulation. пѓЃ

Gas SimulationsпѓЃ

Gas or smoke simulations are a subset of the fluids system, and can be used for simulating collections of airborne solids, liquid particulates and gases, such as those that make up smoke. It simulates the fluid movement of air and generates animated Voxel textures representing the density, heat, and velocity of other fluids or suspended particles (e.g. smoke) which can be used for rendering.

Example of a fire simulation. пѓЃ

WorkflowпѓЃ

At least a Domain object and one Flow object are required to create a fluid simulation.

Create a Domain object that defines the bounds of the simulation volume.

Set up Flow objects which will emit fluid.

Set up Effector objects to make the fluid interact with objects in the scene.

Assign a material to the domain object.

Save the blend-file.

Bake the Cache for the simulation.

There are Quick Liquid and Quick Smoke tools which will automatically create a domain object with a basic liquid or smoke and fire material.

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How can I create a water material in Cycles?

I’m creating a scene with large amounts of water that will be readily visible, containing refraction and at various angles. The scene is an indoor long-course swimming pool, about 50 meters, all of which would be seen by a camera above 5 meters above the water’s surface. This is being fluid-sim’d, but there are no quickly-moving objects or people, so any water movement is slower and in bulk. The «remove bubbles» option is enabled.

I’ve tried using a Mix Shader of Refraction BSDF and Reflection BSDF with the factor coming from a Fresnel node, but the results appear either too glossy or too transparent and overly colored. How can I make the water appear realistic? Changes to shaders (refraction to glass)? Or is tweaking colors sufficient?

8 Answers 8

It is very important to add some small scale displacement to the water surface. This small scale detail is present even in closed spaces due to minor drafts of air, especially in large pools of water. My personal experience is that for best results you can use a combination of animated voronoi textures, like perlin noise does.

This small detail makes it possible to have areas of water that are slightly more refractive or reflective than others. To separate the refraction and reflection parts, you use a standard fresnel factor connected to a mix shader node.

This is my example shader:

(play with index of refraction to achieve a different ratio of refraction to reflection depending on the angle of viewing)

And this is the resulting water:

Of course on indoor scenes you will need many samples or clever lighting to avoid too many fireflies.

Large scale water (almost opaque) looks very different than small scale water (very transparent). Fast water(whiter, low reflectivity) also looks very different than slow water(clearer, high reflectivity). So unfortunately there isn’t a simple answer.

Since water is transparent, the lighting and environment which it’s in is very important. A drop of water in a blank world is going to be invisible. So realistic lighting and proper environment for it to reflect off helps a lot.

Here is another example for a lake water with very deep and strong reflection; Nodes: Result:

I did not let it render much samples(only 3) so the image is low quality, but you can see so water shader looks amazing;)

Hope this answer helps you to make lakes and rivers;)

The Glass BSDF node offers essentially everything that you want.

The IOR you will want to use is 1.333 (from a Blender Artists post), and you’ll pretty quickly get a good look for stationary water. If you want foam, you’ll have to get a little bit clever with your implementation, but water by itself works pretty well just with the single shader.

If you’re using the newest version of Blender, it is also possible to do SSS to mimic the effect of light in water.

Example: My attempt at making a standard water.

Here’s one with SSS; it’s not realistic, but could be helpful for portraying deep water (i.e. oceans).

In short, I’d strongly recommend using a simple Glass BSDF for your water, and if you run into issues trying to work around it, rather than trying to build the water from scratch using reflection/refraction. Cubes aren’t the best way to show this; I put mine inside a «container» because otherwise you get to see the glass reflecting on itself, but this shouldn’t be an issue with a more complex model.

Note that the second render got more samples, so any quality discrepancies are likely due to that.

How to make low poly water? [duplicate]

I’m creating a game in Unity3D and I’m using blender as my main modeling software, The problem here is that I don’t know how to make a low poly water cube, I’ve seen that a lot of people makes this using a plane, but I need to make a cube, and I can´t find how to make this in blender render or in Unity without A package from Asset Store. It should look like this:

1 Answer 1

Rendered in LuxCoreRender just for fancy look.

I’m not sure which cube you are referring to, so I’ll first send you to some fluid sim 101 and then I’ll show you what have I used for this scene.

Now you know how to make simple Fluid sim and here is how I’ve achieved this low poly look:

Domain:

Inflow Object (Cube):

Here I’ve changed only Inlfow Velocity to -5m/s on Z axis. To speed up fluid.

Cycles:

If you want to render it with Cycles you can use this material for Domain object. But if you are gonna to use it with Unity this is optional.

Blender Fluid Simulation Tutorial

The Blender Fluid simulation is a very interesting topic. Usually these simulations are a lot of fun and allow users to create some awesome renders. Blender has Fluid Simulations built-in and they are pretty good too. But it is not easy to use them for a newbie, so let’s see how to create liquid and smoke simulations in Blender yourself.

Blender How to Simulate Liquid

Blender Simulating Liquid can be really confusing on the first glance. But let’s just start. Follow my steps and everything will be altright.

Creating Liquid Simulation Domain in Blender

First of all we need to create bounds for the liquid to contain. We can’t simply put it to nowhere in Blender. So this step is very important, as there always needs to be bounds for the fluids. For this bounds we need to use an object. Any object will be found, but a bit sized Cube would be perfect for now.

Now with this box selected proceed to the Physics Properties and turn on the Fluid Simulation for it by clicking on the name.

Then in the Fluid Type choose the Domain. This means that it will be bound for our Fluid Simulation. You will see the changes to the Cube right away.

Now we need to change the Domain Type from Gas to Liquid. This is important, because it will not work with liquids right now. The Cube should turn back to solid after that.

We also need to change some other settings. Firstly, we need to turn on the Diffusion option. This one is important because it decides how our liquid feels and looks. There are three available presets even for Honey, Oil and Water. I will leave it at the default – Water.

Also enable the neighbouring Mesh option. This will enable a Fluid Mesh that we will create later.

And the last thing is to check in the Cache section whether your Type is set to Replay and not Modular. It should be like that by default, but it is useful to check. Otherwise you could not be able to see liquid in real time.

Creating Liquid Simulation Flow Object in Blender

Now that we created the bound object for our Blender Liquid Simulation, we need to add liquid itself. For this we also need to create an object that will spawn liquid to the scene. The best object for this right now is probably a UV Sphere.

After creation – place it somewhere in the Cube. Turn on the X-Ray[Ctrl+Z] or Wireframe Viewport Shading to help you with this.

Now enable the Fluid Physics Simulation on the Sphere in the Physics Properties. But this time change the Type to the Flow.

After that change the Flow Type to the Liquid, because that is the one that we want to deal with. Also change the Flow Behavior to the Inflow option that will add fluids to the simulation.

Objects are ready and you should be able to Play Animation[Spacebar] and see the fluids flowing. But there is a good chance that nothing happens. It looks like that is a bug. But worry not, because it is easy to fix.

All you need to do is select the Domain Object again and change the Resolution Division setting. You can change it to whatever you want and then turn back. This will just refresh the simulation and fix the problem. Also make sure that your Animation is starting from the exact frame №1.

If you did everything right – the Domain object should become transparent and you should see the fluid particles appearing around the Flow Object in the X-Ray mode.

Simulating Liquids and its Settings

Finally, you should be able to Play Animation now by pressing the [Spacebar]. This should start calculating the physics. This can be heavy on your system and especially on your CPU, so depending on how good it is – it may take some time to calculate. Though after the initial calculations are done – next times would be a lot faster.

As you can see – the result is not very detailed. Water is quite low-poly and is shown in big “chunks”. That is because of the Resolution Division setting in the Domain Object settings. The bigger the value of these settings – the more detailed your liquid will be and vice versa. But, of course, this will also change the calculation times tremendously.

The minimum value is 6 and it looks quite funny. Does not look really like liquid, but more like jello. Though the calculations are practically instant.

The default value of 32 is more of a preview value. It is high enough that you would see the minimum amount of details and approximation of how liquid will behave. But it is always recommended to bump this setting up a lot before rendering.

This shows how much better it looks by only increasing it to the 50 divisions:

Changing Resolution Divisions to a 100 resulted in a really nice simulation quality that you see below. By far has most details and small droplets everywhere from liquid hitting the ground and walls. But it was very slow compared to the others. Though people usually go even higher for final renders.

The other important setting is the Time Scale just under the Resolution Division. It controls how fast the liquid simulates. Meaning how much changes between each frame. The default value is 1.0 and all the previous results were with it.

Here is the result of the Resolution Division 50 calculation, same as was 2 screenshots before. But with the Time Scale set to 2.

If you compare – you will see the difference. The one with the bigger Time Scale is a lot further in animation, there are more liquid and it is calmer already. Even though it is the same frame of the animation.

Usually people decrease the Time Scale value. This will slow down the animation, but each frame of the animation will be more detailed. Some people use this to increase the detail level of their final render animation. Sometimes you can even decrease Time Value by a lot and then in post-production increase the speed of the animation so it would look realisticly.

How to Add Collision Objects to the Fluid Simulation

Just simulating plain liquid in a box is not that interesting. It is far better when there is something for these Fluids to interact with. Some other objects that they can wrap around.

To add an object like this – first create one. It can be any mesh that you like, absolutely no restrictions. Then, if you read our Blender Physics Simulation you would guess that we probably should add Collision Physics to it, because that is the one that interacted with other physics.

That is not right, sadly. Because liquid goes right through the object. Same goes for the Active and Passive Rigid Bodies.

What we really need to do is to again add a Fluid Physics to the object. But this time we will choose the Effector Type.

This means that the object will be affected by our fluids. And by default Effector Type is set to Collision and that is exactly the one that we need. Now it will Collide with our object.

You may need to change the Resolution Division back and force again to refresh the simulation. And then it should be done:

Our Fluid collides with the mesh and wraps around it nicely.

Blender How to Simulate Smoke

There is more to Fluid Simulations in Blender than just Liquids. Namely I am talking right now about Smoke Simulation. So let’s create a small scene with the Smoke Simulation.

Basically it is all the same as the Liquid Simulation that we did before, we just need to change some settings a bit. That is why I am even going to use the same scene I had – a big Cube and Sphere inside it.

First of all I want to change the Domain type of my Cube back to Gas as it was by default.

After that you also need to change the Flow Object’s Flow Type from the Liquid to either Smoke or Fire + Smoke.

When this is done – you can Play Animation[Spacebar] and see how Smoke starts coming out from the sphere and interacting with the Cube’s “roof”.

All the same rules from the Liquid Simulation also apply here. Meaning that Time Scale will increase or decrease the speed of the smoke appearing and moving and the Resolution Division will increase or decrease its detail level.

Resolution Division 100

And, of course, you can create Effector Objects that will interact with the smoke just as they did with the Liquids.

Conclusion Blender Fluid Simulation

At the beginning a Blender Fluid Simulation can be really confusing and we know it. But we hope that with the help of this tutorial you learned how you can use Blender to simulate physical liquids and smoke. Here the final animation below.

Have a look also at our other Blender Tutorials and Top 3D Model Reviews.

Make meshes simulate like water?

What I want to do is, instead of using water with water simulation, I want to make lots of cubes flow like water (like the water simulation does with the mesh). Remesh won’t work, because I want to be able to edit the cubes afterwards to make some of them different.

3 Answers 3

You can approach it like this:

Make simple fluid sim, low resolution will be enough:

Create a plane and subdivide to get your blocks «resolution», position it very high above the water. Add Shrinkwrap modifier to project it onto the simulation:

Parent a little cube under the plane and set dupli verts:

Render it with plane transparent:

Add an ground plane and make column of little cubes from just 1 little cube (to fill holes in water):

As this is based on a voxel simulation you don’t get data how the cubes move inside the volume (or on the surface), they are just stationary. To do that you would have to base it from particles. Thats for another approach, this is super fast to setup and simulate.

If i understood your question correctly, you can use the particles engine with dupli-object to simulate a flow of cubes.

Fluid Particles are explained in the Blender manual here.

Check out the sample file I put together.

Finally a solution to this has been found. Mike Pan’s solution was great, but another method is here. I found this on Blender Nation:

The process is to do a standard fluid sim, add a remesh modifier set to ‘blocks’ and then turn on dupliverts for the fluid object (and parenting a ‘brick’ object to the fluid). That’s basically it! Dupliverts gives great performance and remesh allows lower or higher resolution fluid depending on it’s resolution. The material is just a gradient mapped on the ‘brick’ which changes colour depending on height.

The actual building effect at the beginning is a particle system and an ‘Explode’ modifier on a different object. An animated object defines the ‘time’ of when particles emit and the explode modifier makes sure the particles are invisible until emission (by unchecking ‘Unborn’ and checking ‘Alive’ and ‘Dead’ on the modifier). The reverse happens on the pile of bricks to the side so they disappear as the other ones appear.

If all that sounds confusing, a full tutorial will be up in a few weeks hopefully.