ONE OF YOUR FIVE A DAY!
I saw a video online where someone had produced a simulation of coffee beans in a grinder and I wanted to do something similar, whilst putting my own spin on it. I decided to make a smoothie!
For the setup I created a ramp which the fluid and friut would roll down into the chamber.
There were a few approaches I explored to get the desired effect to work. The first iteration had the fruit and the fluid in the same simulation where they affected one another. This did work, however the sim was incredibly slow at a high enough resolution for the fluid to A) Interact realisitcally with the surface of the objects & B) Have enough detail when meshed to produce wine details.
In the second iteration I simulated the fruit and the fluid seperatley. By simulating the fruit first the secondary fluid simulation was much waster as it wasn’t having to feeback between the RBD Solver and the FLIP solver. Obviously this meant that the movement of the fruit would never be influenced by the fluid, but as the two sims were sharing the motion vector source I summarised that the difference would be negligable.
In order to get the movement correct and consistent I used motion vectors to pull the fluid around the edges of the chamber. This allowed me to have the fluid and the fruit objects constatntly rotate.
It took some tweaking to get the fruit objects to behave how I wanted them to, the problems I ran into were that they were either too dense and coudn’t make the full loop or too light and flew around far too chaotically. It took a few iterations to find a happy medium.
Another decision I make was to not have the fluid so viscous as to stick to the surface of the fruits. I’m aware that if this was a real blender the fruit would be obliterated almost immediatley and even if there wre no blades they would dissappear into the liquid immediatley so you would just have a bunch of white lumps flying about. A bit of artistic licence here with the goal being just a cool shot!
Below are a few screen grabs of the setup and some close up’s of the fruit geometry.