Looking for presets

Two years ago I wrote an article talking about Presets for RF4. This article is off-line now. Anyway that article was based on RF4 but due to some changes in RF5 the performances are different now and more accuracy. You can see some of the videos I did in the RF YouTube channel (Prefix “Preset”).

I would be very glad to reproduce that article here but I have not access to it by now, for that reason I was making several sims to compare for my own. (Videos are HD, it is recommended see ing the videos at full screen. The other parameters not evaluated are set by default)

These are the results.

Density: 250, 1.000, 3.000, 1.0000

The Densities does not use to affect the motion of the fluid,  you can only see the difference using two different fluids with different densities or involving dynamic bodies in the simulation, in the next example the object has a mass of 4375 units, approximately same density as water (1000 units) the fluid has different densities.

Density: 100, 1.000, 10.000, 50.000

The different Viscosities are more evident in the next examples.

Viscosity: 3, 5,  25, 100

In the case of the Surface Tension you can see more particles are grouped when higher values are used in the surface tension parameter.

Surface Tension: 2, 10, 25, 100

But the best way to see the effect is using less particles.

Surface Tension: 0, 1, 10, 100, 1.000, 10.000, 100.000

Get all Parameters

I guess most of advance users know this, but this version of RealFlow has included a large list of improvements in scripting. One I use a lot is the getAllParameterNames(). This function let you know all parameters has the node evaluated, for instance open a batch script window and write

scene.message(str(Container02.getAllParameterNames()))

This gives you a list of tuples (may be a little bit unsorted) with the name of all the parameters and its type accessible via scripting, is an easy and quick way to check the parameters list in the node you are working with.

How to animate emitter attributes in RFRK2.0?

Some features in RF5 are not available directly in RFRK 2.0, one of them is the possibility to animate the radius or splash, those which are included in the sequence tab:

To animate the particles attributes you have to do it manually, I mean using a simple mel line. First go to the frame you want to animate and set the value, then write in the Script Editor:

setKeyframe “rfrk_geo_flowmesher21.files[0].radius”;

Where files[0] is the first emitter in the tab list and radius is the attribute to set the key.

This video shows four particles with an animation in both Radius and Plygone Size attributes.

Note: Thanks to Mihnea Balta for the tip.