Mantaflow
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Has anyone seen this software (Mantaflow)? It is free software for adding liquid, smoke, and foam flows in 3D software. In particular, it is available in the latest version of Blender (2.82). My real question is whether it could be used in SketchUp.
Anton_S or Fredo6 could this be added to your plugins?
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Hi Dave! Is there a specific use-case you're looking to achieve with Mantaflow, or particle effects in general, in SketchUp? I believe turning particle effect results into edge/face geometry would overwhelm SketchUp.
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In the past I have modeled car washes and used Fredo6's Animator plugin to animate the car going through the wash. For the water spray and foam, I just had to show still images of these items as the car past through the appropriate piece of equipment.
I have not done any models for a a good while now and I consider myself retired. However, as I was looking at Blender and noticed that Mantaflow is now a part of Blender 2.82 I thought of the car wash and wondered if it might be a tool for automating the water spray and foam in the car wash.
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So, as one use case, you're aiming to simulate water droplets over a collidable surface with the influence of gravity and other forces. Because SketchUp is really slow with generating geometries, it may only be practical to draw simulation with SketchUp OpenGL API (currently limited and not exportable with images) just for the visualization purpose or even render in a separate OpenGL window (faster but may be more complicated). Then, we can generate water blob geometries from particular frames of the simulation and then replay those particular frames as an animation in SketchUp (by hiding and showing particular blob and droplet groups with time). The only concern here is the file size that the resulting animation could take. Nevertheless, this is possible. If Mantaflow has options to convert particle blobs into triangular meshes, then consider plugin complexity cut in half.
This should be an interesting plugin to develop utilizing Mantaflow or another fluid library. I don't think I am currently able to this, but will definitely tackle this in the future, unless someone else wants to tackle this first.
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Thanks for the reply @Anton_S. Sounds like an interesting challenge for the future.
I am amazed at the complexity that can be generated in Blender and still have good performance. While it has a lot of power it certainly is not as easy to use (learn) as SketchUp. For modeling some things it can do a lot of things that require plugins in SketchUp but then there are also things which you can do in SketchUp that I have not figure out/learned how to do in Blender.
I may be wrong but it seems to me that SketchUp's power is in the architectural area where Blender's power is more in the area of gaming. JMHO
Guess the "shelter at home" and being retired (older) gives me more time to explore/play/learn. Guess that is what comes with age.
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@Anton_S, here is an old animation (about 4 years ago) that I did with Animator and Twilight Render. While it is old and certainly not perfect I think it will give you an idea of the type of animation where I would like to be able to include something like the Manataflow fluid animation capabilities (or something like it). In a typical car wash there are several pieces of equipment that emits fluids and foam.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8hjQvpxC6pI
Now if you can stop laughing at the example, perhaps you can get a better idea of where I would (rather would have) used something like this. I am sure there are others would like capabilities like Mantaflow in SketchUp.
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Yes! I see the outcome and the benefit of having a plugin for creating water, soap, and foam animations. Brush contact effects would be beneficial as well. I will look into this. If no one else begins working on this, I will develop this plugin upon updating my other plugins.
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Look forward to see what you come up with. Also curious if it is possible to implement Mantaflow snide of Sketchup.
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