best way to animate water pushing past some really huge propellers

MITVIZ

Hi, i have something like a barge with really large propellers, i need to show the water pushing past them underwater, creating some disturbances underwater etc, much like how a real one works, any solutions to tackling this problem? and suggestions are welcomed, i tried phoenix fd but the simulation is so slow its hard to receive feedback from using that app its just too slow

Eric Chadwick

For rendering in your DCC, or realtime in a game engine? 

Animated refraction should be good enough in most cases, plus particles for the bubbles. 

MITVIZ

its for a rendered animation so a short movie almost, how would you go about doing an animated refraction?

Eric Chadwick

What software? What renderer? 

MITVIZ

3ds max and Fstorm renderer

Mark Dygert

I wonder if you could adapt the technique Jamie Gwilliam used to make heat distortion on a jet. 

https://jamiesjewels.typepad.com/jamies_jewels/2011/12/simulating-heat-distortion-in-3ds-max-and-post.html

I imaging the process could roughly be similar, using particle emitters and some post process. 

Likewise you can also experiment with a cylinder with high tessellation and noise applied, possibly animate a few channels of noise for high and low frequency details. Applying a refraction shader to it should help sell the effect too.

Eric Chadwick

Yeah. In Max with V-Ray I would use a cylinder around the propeller, with a Falloff as a mask for IOR, and a Noise to animate the turbulence. Not sure how Fstorm wants it though.

musashidan

If you have PhoenixFD available then go with that. Crazy to let one of the most powerful fluid simulators go to waste. The reason it is slow is because you probably don't know how to optimise the settings for good results vs rendertimes. I haven't used it in a few years, but when I did it was on a mid-range workstation and I got very nice results with very acceptable sim times.

Also, tyflow is still beta and free to use. Either of these tools will give the best results by far.

MITVIZ

hmmm, yeah phoenix is stil an issue for me tyflow is something i am looking into as well