Hi I’ve been struggling trying to model a porous material that I can flow a liquid through. I can get the effect I want through textures in cycles, but then it’s just a solid block of material and I can’t do any animation with.
I’m trying to achieve a bone or sponge model similar to this…
I tried taking a bunch of stretched spheres and doing a Boolean difference, but the mesh is FAR too complex and usually crashes my computer.
Any thoughts?
You may have quite literally picked the most difficult situation in both modeling and fluid simulation. It’s pretty rare that I say this, but… Blender probably isn’t the tool for this. The only method I can think of that won’t take a CRAZY amount of time would be to find a tool that can convert a procedural volume into a mesh. I’m not even sure that such a thing exists. Then there’s the issue of doing the fluid sim. An object with such small pockets and barriers between cells is pretty much worst case scenario for any fluid solver.
Another method for getting a mesh like that might be running a cell fracture on a shape, joining all of the pieces into one mesh, removing doubles, then deleting only faces. From there you could add a skin modifier and play with settings, but I can’t promise that it will be pretty.
The fluid sim in Blender can’t resolve this sort of detail. If you are looking for accuracy I don’t have much help for you but if you just want the look you should try a particle system emitting from a hidden emitter corresponding to the spaces. Even then the geometry may be too dense for the effect to look real, and you might have to eliminate a lot of the interior.
Thank you for the honest advice! I will try the cell fracture method - sounds like it will need some googling.
If i were to scrap the fluid animation would there be an easier method to model the porous material?
I have an idea. But it sounds too crazy and does nothing with liquids at all. It concerns a volume material in BI.
There is an option in Voxel Data texture to use image sequence. All you have - is to make such sequence.
The soluition is to create volume of particles (spheres with some deformations or even metaballs if blender will sustain such amount of metaballs), then animate camera’s near and far clipping planes from closest to farest end of that volume so you will have sequence of slices of that volume.
Then you load that sequence into Voxel Data texture, make your volume material very dense and you will have something… Something! =) It wouldn’t have shininess and you would have to set Light Cache very high or turn off it at all to get fine shadows.
But you should get one porous thing.
This is what you will get:
To get this, first you need to switch to layer 1, set scene camera to “Camera_Slicer”, set amount of particles in the “Cube” to 70000 or whatever you want, render animation, switch to layer 2 and camera to “Camera”, select “Cube.001”, go to material, go to textures, set rendered sequence into texure, render! =)
sponge.blend (115 KB)
There’s a person who made python plugin for C4D with which artist can make such meshes procedurally. I’m no coder but i’m amazed at results and would love to see something like that in Blender… if this info can help you, enjoy. You can take a look here: Code Vonc Proc3durale
Page is in french.
