VEF2 (Visual Effects 2) Project 4

Reference Link:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zz5lGkDdk78&feature=youtu.be&t=1m47s

So for this project I wanted to replicate the viscosity of honey. I started out by finding some reference. This took me a few minutes but I was able to get several viscous liquids in one shot for comparison.

The next thing I did was create a honey dipper. I looked online for some reference and then modeled it inside of Maya. This took me maybe 20 minutes to do. The hardest part was bringing the geometry into Houdini and getting the scale right.

So after I had my geometry inside of Houdini and scaled correctly, I went about creating my liquid. I started out by creating a sphere and scaling it to the desired size. Then I translated the sphere to the right spot and used turned it into an emitter. I then changed the particle separation to a number that worked better for the liquid I wanted to replicate. I ended up with a particle separation of 0.035. The next thing I did was increase the viscosity inside of the Auto Dop Network to 1250. I then turned on friction and bounce inside the Flip Solver node. Next I increased the friction to 0.5 and left the bounce at 0. I found that leaving the division size at the default worked just fine for my purposes.

At this point I was getting the desired thickness of the honey. So I did some playblasts to see how things were turning out. I changed my design to mimic the candy bar chocolate coating process overtop of a 3D text object of my name. I played around with the animation for a few hours and was getting something fairly good. But in the end I decided to scrap it and went back to my original idea of honey pouring onto a honey dipper. This dramatically decreased the frames needed and made my simulation run much faster due to the lack of motion to calculate.

Next I concentrated on the shader for my honey. This took a long time to get right. I played around with the diffuse and subsurface for a decent amount of time before I got a good result. I then messed with the reflection and refraction properties. I had to turn the reflection intensity way up in order to get the right look I was after. At this point I wanted to get an environment in my scene before I got any further with the shader. So I looked around my computer and found an HDR of a kitchen that seemed to work well. So I set up the environment light with the HDR mapped out. I then had to rotate the HDR a little to get the desired area of the image. Now I could finish working with the fluid shader and know for sure how the final render would look.

So now I had to finish tweaking my shader. I ended up setting my diffuse intensity to 0.078 and my diffuse roughness to 0.044. My subsurface intensity ended up being 0.5. I also increased both the reflection and refraction to a value of 1. I'm pretty happy with the final result of the shader. I'm sure it could be better but I was too pressed for time to mess with it anymore than that.

I then added a marble shader to the honey dipper with mostly default intensity values and color changes to shades of light brown. I had tried using the default wood shader. But my geometry wasn't set up for a shader such as that. So I went with a simple marble shader instead.

Finally I worked on the final shot and render. I placed my camera in place of my perspective camera. Then I tweaked the render quality. I increased the volume quality to 0.5 and the volume shadow quality to 1. I also increased the stochastic sample to 6. After that, I rendered out my scene. This took about 3 hours to do. After that I took the sequence into Nuke and did a little tweaking.