Taking Shape!

In my previous post, I had mentioned that there was an artifact of the POP solver that was causing my FLIP particles to jitter and still wasn't giving the defined shape of a giant gummy bear. After talking with Jeff Wagner, he made it very obvious that the POP solver is not the desired solution because you're simply overriding the FLIP motion (using a point attribute "ballistic"). He recommended using more custom fields to control the movement of the fluid.



This approach gave significantly better results, surprisingly quickly. I'm actually still using the POP solver to pull the particles up, because I like the way they cause the bears to lurch upward in a very organic way. I used an enable solver DOP to switch the POP solver on and off.

The basic premise is to take the goal shape, expand it, and then create a field of vectors that point towards the interior of the goal shape. Then, I created a mask field that was the goal shape of the giant bear and plugged that mask into all of the forces, including gravity.

Now, with the overall simulation laid out, I'm moving on to building the environment and making an animatic.