(This means the sphere will be considered as a filled volume of fluid –by opposition to a hollow sphere with the ‘Shell’ setting).

Select the water droplet, go under the ‘physics’ tab, add the ‘Fluid’ physics modifier, and select the type ‘Fluid’, and ‘Volume’ under ‘Volume initialization’. These four elements (simulation domain, disk, pedestal and droplet) must have the appropriate fluid physics settings selected before running the simulation as shown in the screenshots below. Three elements are present inside the simulation domain: the disk and its pedestal, and a droplet of water to be dropped on the disk in order to generate a ‘splash’ effect. The simulation domain represents the volume inside which the fluid physics simulation will be run. Elements inside the simulation domain can be viewed and selected by restricting the box’s ‘viewport visibility’ (as shown below). This is the fluid simulation domain (to be detailed in the following). Upon opening the file, only a rectangular box is visible. Fortunately, Blender comes with a powerful built-in fluid physics engine, which allows us to easily obtain realistic looking water surfaces, as described below. In order to get a convincing water feel, we need to add features which are unique to liquids, such as ripples, waves and splashing.Ĭreating the turbulent surface of water in motion can be tedious, and difficult to create accurately. Which means that if one simply draws an ideal geometric object such as a sphere or cylinder, and gives it the optical attributes of water (transparency, index of refraction, …) it will, because of its ideal shape, tend to look more like glass than water.

The issue is that a perfectly smooth volume of water is essentially visually indistinguishable from that same volume made out of glass with the same index of refraction. This is one the characteristics one associates with liquids, but also with transparent materials such as glass and ice. Water has high transparency and a higher refractive index (n=~1.33) than air (n~1), which is responsible for refraction effects (bending of light rays at the fluid/air interface). The goal of this model is to generate realistic looking liquids/fluids in blender. Reference for this work: “High-frequency nano-optomechanical disk resonators in liquids,” E.

File download (.blend Blender file): download link (0.1 MB)

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