Waterfall, which method looks better? Smoke, Fluid, or Animated Sprite?

I used fluid to create the running springs and waterfall but noticed at the falls the water was not bubbly/washy (white), so I saw a lot of tutorials that use smoke that falls instead of rise to simulate that affect and I tried that.

The fluid was set with Resolution at 350 with Real World Size set to 1.0 meters and Fluid Boundary Subdivisions set to 2.

The smoke here is set with Resolution Divisions at 80 and High Resolution Wavelet FFT with Divisions at 2.


It still looked like smoke to me and could not get it to look the way I wanted, so I then created an animated texture and put it on a plane mesh and then put those plane meshes in front of each tier where the water should look that way.


Tell me which you think looks better?

Also any smoke settings that would make things look more realistic? (I still feel the smoke waterfall looks like smoke).

I never tried to animate a waterfall, seems like complex to obtain a good result :wink: , however i would use a/multiple particle systems (using animated planes) since they are the quicker and you can have a lot of control.
I think the best is second image, if you can put more transparency on the waterfall whites or tone them down; the smoke seems like too much blurred to me.

they both look too fluffy to me. there seems to be too much turbulence and foam.

I too tried the whole smoke sim as volumetric frothy water thing recently. I know exactly why you thought it would work but I’ll tell you why it won’t: there’s no surface. You need gloss on a surface to get water looking right, even foamy splashing water, and there is no way to give smoke or parts of smoke a surface. The best you can do is intersperse the smoke with mesh particles, but so far the best I’ve managed with that technique looked like smoke from a glitter bomb. I strongly recommend abandoning the smoke method.

@K_Horseman I felt the same way. I set the Vorticity way down to near 0 but it still looks all fluffy, I even tried making the Size smaller (like 0.2) and more particles (Number 10000) but still doesn’t look real.



@K_Horseman ok, but what in the world is a glitter bomb? do you have any blend’s you can share so I can take a look at how its used?

I dunno, a bomb full of glitter? The point is it just looked like sparkly smoke and never managed to look like anything else because essentially that’s all it was. I have some files but they’re really useless. I spent about 5 days on this conferring with some of the best shader designers I’ve met in this community and we just couldn’t get it to look like anything good. Just sparkly smoke, like someone had thrown a grenade and some confetti. Definitely never looked like water. Again, the main reason for this is that smoke has no surface, and a good water shader requires one.

@K_Horseman oh I see, do you mean like an explosion? Wouldn’t an explosion be a one-time thing? in order to produce a waterfall you would need a “continuous” explosion.

How do the animated sprite/planes look? do they look more real? the animated texture was generated using FCP’s Motion’s default waterfall with an increased gravitational acceleration.

Well I was doing a large scale splash rather than a a waterfall so it was more explosive, but in either case the necessary shading effect is the same. The only difference is the direction of flow really.

The sprites look better but still pretty cotton fluffy. I wonder is this could be done better with some sort of animated displacement texture on a mesh surface instead.

@K_Horseman oh you mean like with a mesh shaped like waterfall and then put a UV map texture on it and animate the UV? I tried that from the start and I personally did not like it, it literally looked like what I just described (too obvious) and I really wanted to go in the direction of particles.

I can make the animated texture planes less fluffy (I didn’t feel they were too fluffy, but maybe they were too opaque, adding some transparency could help) but again, they also suffered from the same problem, they looked like flat planes with animated textures.

The scene I showed you has a couple of angles in the movie, the en face one I showed you is easy to get away with a plane and texture, but there are corner camera angles where you would obviously see the waterfall plane meshes as just that, flat plane meshes with animated textures on it.

sigh I guess there is other way to make this look more real with particles, huh? :frowning:

I would recommend trying to use particles with a very high trail count (at least 7), and use a halo material with a very small size (maybe around 0.100). Also use Looots of particles - maybe 50,000. This will create a very nice streaming water effect. Then, use those same particles to generate Smoke with heavy gravity.

The key with creating realistic waterfalls is to have rough geometry for the particles to interact with. So, spend some time modelling bumpy rocks and outcroppings as obstacles for the particles to react against. The more realistic the area ‘behind’ the water is, the more realistic the water flow will look. Hope that helps!

Good advice Illusionist.

It’s quite a challenge. I tried fluid simulation but that’s only suitable for small scale closeups with ‘real’ water with correct refraction index etc. Very intensive to compute.

For large scale falls from a distance particles are the tool of choice I think. Maybe a combination of fluid particles and smoke…
And indeed a landscape and interesting geometry for the particles to interact with.

Anyway, it always helps and is very relaxing to watch vids of real waterfalls, there are plenty on youtube, for example this real footage from Venezuela (fast forward to 4 minutes to watch the highest falls on the planet):


Humbling too, no 3d trickery - even in big budget movies - can come close to the beauty and grace of real waterfalls!

@Illusionist wow, thanks so much, it was so simple but I think it works out quite well.

Just using particles alone with the halo and settings you mentioned really look nice:


I set the particle’s Trail to 20 so it looked more like a trail and decreased the number to around 25000 (50000 seemed too much). Or perhaps I could be wrong in that aesthetic?

PS I also set the Material’s Add to 0.25 to make it shine a little with the angled sun.

Wow! I’m really glad that worked out. Yeah, I might dig around through my old files and see if I can find the original waterfall render.

But yes, I think your render, @SandraLAVixen, looks a lot more realistic, especially with the splashes interacting with the water!

Well the splashes were really just smoke that dosen’t rise, I kinda cheated G

I like how its looking so far. :slight_smile: Currently I’m animating it, and I’m using Sampled Motion Blur to make it look more realistic, but that’s going to take a week to render just a few seconds.

Thanks everyone!! :slight_smile: