Problems So Far

So after experimenting with the use of fluid containers and particles systems for a couple of weeks I see potential for their combination, regarding this project. By agitating the water within the fluid container I can create waves of a sort, and with the particle system floating on top of the fluid, it makes for a reasonable foamy substance.

What I find frustrating is the confines of the fluid container, it makes generating waves difficult because of the limited space, increasing it doesn't really help or hinder, the backwash of the wave hitting the opposite side makes it painfully obvious that the scene is taking place with a bath tub, not an ocean.

Even without this flaw the system still aggravates me as no matter the forces I apply to the fluid within, the result is generally the same, the fluid acts as a whole rather than a series of particles. For example when applying a wind factor the fluid will move forward in a wave like motion, but it will be nearly the entire fluid moving at one.

It feels like the fluid in the containers sticks together too readily, I toyed with the idea of using multiple fluid containers reacting to the same forces but that resulted in some identical boxes with water flopping about. An option to get around this was to create a particle system and fill an object that would serve as the base of the ocean.

This approach led to some problems with the particles reacting too violently to forces, breaking apart too readily and not keeping a the shape of a wave. I solved this by some careful tweaking of the particle's friction and stickiness, while being careful not to turn the fluid into mustered.

There would be no problem with this normally however the foam particle system became buried rather quickly. I attempted to compensate by increasing the foam emitter's spawn and decay rates so that foam would stay a visible feature. This worked to a degree but I'm still not satisfied as to how it turned out.

As for the foam system itself I found creating a realistic effect very difficult. At first it worked really well get it to float and having the stickiness setting quite high allowed for it to bind together well when moving a top the waves. However because of this stickiness after a period of time clumps of sea foam would build up and because of the fact I was working within a confined space with the fluid container and then a set geometry these clumps would quickly bind together.

The problem was magnified by the fact I was using motion fields move the foam with the waves for a more realistic effect. One way I thought of to get around this was to create an object which when collision occurs between a foam particle and it, the stickiness attribute would be reduced and so the foam could spread out again.

This would require each element in the particle system to have a constantly increasing stickiness value to a certain point so that the previous effect remained. When tested rendering speed was decreased yet again, and this was on an extremely small scale.

The rendering speeds of this project are continuing to worry me, I have made several reminders to leave a sizable amount of time for the final product render.