Creating Water in Max

[Tim Bobyk]

For my next animated short I need to have quite a bit of water. The only problem is I haven't really played with making water in Max, or particles much even. If anyone has any suggestions or knows of any good tutorials on the subject I'd like to see them. The water that I need to create is:
An Aquarium
Running Water from a tap filling up a glass
Some water running down the chin of my character would be nice but not necessary to the animation.
I am using 3D Studio Max 4.2 and have Reactor 1.0

Also if anyone knows where the Brazil r/s Public Beta is still available on the net (it's temporarily down on splutterfish.com) plz let me know.

[kuman]

if you wanna do a true simulation the only tool i know of that can pull this off is real flow (anyone know any other great fluid sims?).

however it can be faked. for example your water filling up a glass idea can be two peices of geometry one that's the tap flow the other the water in glass. you animate one rising and the other falling. you'll need to do lots of tweaking with animation on both surfaces to make it really believeable but it can be done.

as for the water running down the chin of your character, i'd probably do that with an animated texture. animated bump and specular could pull of a thin layer of water reasonably well i think.

however if you have a lot of different simulations where you have a ton of closeups and really need something that looks real then real flow is probably what you're gonna need to go with.

good luck
-k

[Tim Bobyk]

Thanks Kuman, I'll see what I can do with that, who makes real flow?

[kuman]

the company is called next limit
here's a link http://www.nextlimit.com/

[Incitatus]

Hmm, I've never really tried to create flowing water. But you could try metaparticles. Don't think it would look very realistic but it's better than nothing :)