Lava simulations

This is my personal approach to the lava behaviour, although there are several types of lava I´ve choosed a very high viscous type. The most important in the lava simulation is combine both motion and shading. In this case I used Render Kit to read the implicit parameters in the particle bin files. I started doing some tests with a simple simulation of a draining drop I had simulated yet, the settings are viscosity to 60 and surface tension to 560.

The previous example has the vorticity computed to use it later. Although the simulation is pretty simple it gives you the opportunity to play with several parameters in the shading, velocity, pressure, vorticity, etc.. You can download the shader to explore it in depth, I have to say it could be improved.

The most complex was to get a good shading network that allow me to control the lava look without to change a lot of parameters, for this renders I used a combination of texture and vorticity data from particles bins.

These are several tests I did…

…and the one I choosed a little bigger.

The next step was to apply this settings to a lava flow type simulation. The simulation is not very impressive, but enough to demonstrate that is very important the way you simulate  the fluid, comparing with the first example the look is different due to de simulation, but the shader is the same.

Next, both RealFlow simulation and render videos. I added a roughness map to the slide surface to break the shape in the fluid.