About: I am a digital artist and computer geek with interests in Linux, open source design programs, and saving the world. You will find me blogging here about art, life, technology, and other mildly amusing things. Paint splashes in Blender
You’re looking at a little experiment tonight with fluid dynamics in Blender. I had an idea to use the fluid dynamics in the new version of Blender to simulate the grungy paint splashes that are the staple of many modern vector art styles. The premise was, if Blender will let me simulate throwing a bunch of fluid at a wall, it will hopefully come out looking pretty neat. This technique eventually gave some results, but turned out to be both time-consuming and cpu-consuming. Unfortunately, the computation required to achieve the level of splash detail I desired proved difficult to manage. The image above is one of the most balanced and detailed images I got, and yet is still very simplistic and lacks the fineness that makes the style appealing to the eye.
I hope that with some more tuning I might be able to achieve flattened results with the detail of these examples. For now however, it seems that the fastest, easiest, and most beautiful method is also the most simple one — scanning in real paint on real paper. 
RSS 2.0
I’ve been working with the fluid simulator for some time, and am rather impressed with the improvements they made to it with 2.42.
I admit it’s a little difficult to get fine details with it, but the particle sytem may go a long way towards that.
The best I can do without crashing my system is a resolution of about 192. At that point though, it’s a set-it-up-and-watch-a-movie-on-tv sort of thing.
What kind of hardware are you working with?
Comment by human-powered — July 17, 2006 @ 6:43 pm
Oh yeah, the progress they’ve made at free software fluid simulation is fantastic. I am so impressed at how far things have come. Last night was a reality check of sorts to see if it was a feasible option for the sort of splatter effects I was looking for.
I was running the simulation on my laptop — which is a 2.8 ghz P4 with 512mb ram. I think I was topping out at a resolution of about 125… though this may very well be a ram/storage related issue. I can forsee running it at 192 would increase the complexity of the shapes quite considerably — but when it’s taking 20 minutes to churn out a single, difficult to preview frame of fluid interaction, is it really worth it to fake it?
I’d love to see some of your renders of Blender fluid if you have them.
Comment by chromakode — July 18, 2006 @ 11:23 pm
Unfortunately, none of them are really worth posting, but I can give the paint splat idea a try tonight.
You’ve got a (far) better CPU than I, though only half the RAM.
Comment by human-powered — July 19, 2006 @ 8:32 am