A little while back, I came across an opportunity to work in 3d on a spot for something called thrill. I guess it is supposed to be a thriller/horror channel airing out in asia. The basically wanted to come up with different ways to kill their logo.

In this post, I am going to touch quickly on 3 pieces of software. Blender, RealFlow and Cinema 4D.

Previous to this I had been experimenting with trying to create fluid, mostly water, and had some success using this free software called "Blender".

Blender is primarily 3d software for creating characters and environments for video games.

It is pretty good in that area I must say, emphasis on "good" because above anything, it is free. Free is good! Blender also has a slew of fluid particle generating features that include liquid, smoke, clouds and fire (not sure about the fire).

However, even though it has these abilities, they are somewhat limited on customizing. When the Thrill project came my way, I jumped at the chance to make blood because they wanted me to kill the logo :)

I created the 3d environment using cinema 4d and had it all set up in about half a day. I then set on the blood.

4 days later, after much frustration, I had something that looked ok but the blood just wasn't right. It kept quivering. No matter what I did, it would quiver.

To make matters worse, I wasn't able to get my blood back into Cinema 4d without an exhaustive 25 step process taking about 2 hours to complete. Once in C4D, it looked like ass and would take quite a while to render. I have an example of the quivering blood below.

After a few more days of exhaustive experimenting and numerous posts to forums, I threw in the towel in regards to blender. I know when I am beat. I swapped Blender for some software called RealFlow. RealFlow is awesome! It is an amazing liquid dynamics software that plays nicely with all the different 3D apps out there. I quickly fell in love and in about 4 hours, realized I was back on track to making this damn logo bloody!

Here is an example of the fluid dynamics between Blender and RealFlow in a similar side by side comparison

The real difficulty in creating liquid comes down to properly constructing the model.  The scale of the model is directly related to the scale of the fluid.  Think of those 80's movies and B movies where they use scale models to simulate a flood or a damn breaks.  They use miniatures and then have real water running through the set.  It looks fake because the scale of the water is obviously not in relation to the scale of the model.  My scale is obviously off.  Thankfully, my blood work has improved a lot since creating this first version so the newer ones don't look so hokey.

This is a quick video showing the RealFlow fluid wireframe and a few frame renders of what it looks like in Cinema 4D.