Blender R&D - cheap and easy boiling water effect (Patreon)

in this research and development project

i wanted to create a water boiling in a pot effect, first i tried using the fluid simulation system, 

the results where not good and took too long to preview, every change you made costed more than a minute to preview

not only was using fluid simulation computer intensive but you also have to add afew extra frames in the begining of the simulation to let the water settle as it mophs from the fluid object to the fluid, this is wasteful.

i think blender should implement an initial state like realflow for fluids so you only have to do it once, and when the fluids settle you set that as the initial state and the fluids can simulate from that state

the fluid simulation results where also not the best looking so i knew i had to look for a better and faster solution that dint require hrs just to preview the results, something that worked in realtime.

i tried different techniques but one that worked best for this specific scenario was using a particle system for the bubbles and dynamic painting with the bubble particles set as the brush.

This is also not as straight forward as you may think, i had to spend hrs and hrs to come to the right settings

-> canvas settings

this should be a mesh, that is in the shape of the fluid you want to simulate with enough subdivisions

since most of the resolution is needed on the surface you can subdivide just the top part

in the physics tab

turn on dynamic painting,  this mesh will be the canvas

format -> vertex

Surface type -> waves

Dumping 0.38

the dumping is set to this so that the displacement from the waves is not too high and noisy

Spring -> 0.73

this will let the bubble displacements disappear quick making it seem like the bubbles pop

Brush settings

this should be a particle system with the render object set to a mesh in a shape of a bubble

the life setting in the particle settings will be how long it takes the bubbles to pop

Source -> particle system

use particle radius -> checked

you can examine the project file to see how everything works together

thank you