WS Tech (Patreon)

I was doing a bunch of tests on stuff for WS related things. At first, I figured I'd just use fluid sims to get the stream I wanted. I did do that rigged alembic stream awhile ago, which would work if there's not something that the stream hits, but this time we'll see the fluid hit something!

It looks good, but it takes a very long time to bake and, on top of that, motion blur on fluids isn't supported in Eevee. So it might not even look that good in the end, and rebaking takes forever, it's just very hard to use.

I began to experiment with particles since motion blur works really with them, the domain is the entire world, and it's much, much faster to use.

My first tests were promising.

There was one issue I found though, spotty emission... which isn't desireable. It makes the effect look very video gamey.

I have good news though! I found out why it's like this. The emission doesn't do any interpolation when they're parented to a bone. So it looks bad when moving quickly. But there is interpolation when the object is moving with it's own keyframes. A work around is just bake the animation on the emitter objects to get nice, smooth emission.

I don't even know if anyone knows about this problem or how to solve it, I couldn't find anything when I was digging around the internet. But it's not a huge deal because the blender people keep talking about re-writing the particle system and (hopefully) this is solved when it's re-written.

So I have the stream figured out! I've attached a test with it. I think it looks pretty good considering it's a lot of really tiny transparent, glossy low polygon spheres! Like, for how fast this is to use, this looks great. I'd love to use real fluids for [p]i[s][s] one day. But it's just too heavy for my setup to be a realistic solution.

Also, here's some floppy [d]ONG!