It’s a bad way to start your morning when your cup of joe is porous!
This is my first fluid dynamics attempt, having watched/listened/learned from BlenderGuru. If I merely enclose my coffee mug with a tight domain, the fluid (it’s my own roasted variety) settles into the mug in the first couple of frames and then my falling sugar cubes cause the coffee to splash up, out, and all over the “walls” of my domain, just as a 3D artist would expect. But as I scale up the domain so that it encompasses the coffee table upon which I have set my coffee mug, the initial frame of the animation shows the coffee to now be occupying space not only inside the mug proper, but also inside the walls of the mug and outside the mug. And I just get a mess of coffee pouring right through everything.
My mug is a Fluid: Obstacle, it’s normals have been recalculated.
My coffee is a Fluid: Fluid. It was created by selecting the inner wall mesh of the coffee mug, duplicating that mesh, separating it from the mug object, and then the top and bottom of it were closed off with new faces. Then its normals were recalculated. It was scaled down a little bit so that it was no longer touching the mug walls or floor.
Then I added a cube, set it to be Fluid: Domain, positioned and sized it to just surround the mug.
I then added two more cubes, scaled them down pretty small, set them to be Fluid: Obstacles, positioned them above the coffee mug, set keyframes for their position at frame 1 and again at frame 7 where they are resting comfortably inside the coffee mug.
I know it’s wrong to bake coffee, but brewing wouldn’t make sense with other scenes, so I baked it. It looked good. It had the expected artificial cubular splash pattern, but it worked and I was excited.
Then I built a coffee table, made it a Fluid: Obstacle, and set it right under the coffee mug. I expanded the domain to enclose it. Now when I bake, my coffee fluid blob is off-center from the interior of the mug and goes all over the place.
So I tried setting the Origin on the Fluid: Domain to match the Origin on the Fluid: Fluid, but that doesn’t seem to have made any difference. I also tried reshaping the Fluid: Domain to be exact cube, large enough so that it’s center of mass could be at the Origin of the Fluid: Fluid. That didn’t seem to change anything.
I looked at all the settings for both the Domain and the Fluid objects, but there is no “Call a barista” checkbox, so I’m asking here what noobie mistake I’ve made. I’m thinking that when the Fluid:Domain object is small, or close in side to the Fluid:Fluid object size, my positioning errors or Blender math errors are not a factor? And that as I grow the Domain larger these discrepancies begin to matter?
If the right answer is that coffee is too thin and I need to switch to hot chocolate, I can do that but I’ll need experience users to help me get the viscosity right.
This is Blender 2.76rc3