The problem with youtube is that to become monetized and keep getting promoted by the algorithm ,you HAVE to become “audience captured”, meaning that once you find that audience you can never stray away and upload anything different or they stop clicking and viewing and youtube AI buries your videos from “discovery”
For example I don’t play video games
but I like the “grimdark” fictional world of the Warhammer40K video game universe
I rigged some Warhammer40K characters in Blender and created this one 43 second animation that got 23 thousand views and quadrupled my subscriber count from 500 to over 2000
But I want to do more than warhammer40K content so as soon as I uploaded some animated film reviews and other stuff outside that universe,I lost 500 subs
but it does not matter to me because I have a varied interests including 2D cartoon animation and even some political satire/commentary
so I will never be monetized on YT but thats just fine with me.
Frankly, I never really looked into how the YT algorithm works. However, if I wanted to get monetized AND have different interests reflected in my content, I would probably create a separate channel for each niche. That way I could have different content and still appeal to the respective audience. Of course, getting several channels monetized would be even more difficult…
To return to the original subject of this thread, here is a little water simulation I finally rendered (the simulation itself was done several months ago). The red, human-sized stick-figure is for scale.
XP is a decent fluid simulation system but here
The scale of the water seems off
making it look like a tiny movie set miniature.
This is a common problem with large scale waterfall simulations that use only mesh based geometry
The droplets seem too big and typically when water falls that distance you see alot more “mistification” by the time it reaches the bottom due to air friction.
large scale waterfall simulation need to have a secondary layer of fine particles to represent that mistification.
The Chaos System for Autodesk Max seem to handle this well.
I bought flip fluids Addon for Blender($70)
a few years ago and, again while it is a great for rivers and other smaller scale
man made water flows,
sadly it too suffers from this lack of mistification issue
causing large scale water sims to have that
Hollywood “practical set miniature” look.
Actually, there are “water” particles (from three different sources) and separate “foam and spray” particles. For the render, the water particles are meshed and rendered with a “water material”, while the foam & spray particles are rendered as tiny dots (for the “mistification”). Did you watch the 4K version on YT at 4K?
No, this is X-Particles by Insydium.
The C4D particle system does not support (real) fluid simulations yet, although you can sort of “fake” some fluid stuff.
The thing is that the fluid simulation in XP is GPU based (called NeXus), while the smoke and fire sims in XP are CPU based. In C4D, Pyro is GPU-based. Which means for smoke, I use Pyro and for fluid stuff XP. However, my hope is that Maxon will add fluid solvers to its particle system because I would like to be able to combine Pyro effects with fluid effects (e.g. to create steam effects) in one simulation system and keep everything on the GPU.
Also, XP is an extra expense every year, so the more C4D can do natively, the less dependent I’ll be on XP.
I think this would be fine–if not preferabe–if you were doing an animated movie with more stylized characters. As we noted on Lightyear, the backgrounds were sometimes too realistic for the characters, so slightly less real-looking background elements might be a plus. Nirwana’s earlier simulation could probably be tweaked to give it a “bigger” feel by using a different water texture, etc.
To the discussion about what’s popular or not on Youtube, it can be pretty disheartening. I mean, literally, opening a box to show what is inside–can get millions of views, while the aforementioned Brave Creatures, even with its flaws, was a ton of work, and seems like it should have more than 20k views. For my own stuff, okay, I can live with it not going viral, but as an artist I like to get at least some reaction and feedback. But I do wonder about how the algorithm works on Youtube. I constantly get comments from even my subscribers that they didn’t get notified when I uploaded a new Quest video, and I had somebody the other day comment that they were actively looking for my channel and had trouble finding it, so it’s hard to measure success by the numbers. To AutoDidact’s observation about his Warhammer 4K video, certainly tapping into an existing franchise seems to help–my first Star Trek movie has over 750k views, and, while I think it’s a good story, I’m aware that if it wasn’t Star Trek, it would probably hardly have been noticed. To be honest, I thought maybe more of my Trek subscribers would have checked out my Quest stuff, but I’m starting to wonder if Youtube is even telling them about it. When I up-resed my Trek videos to 4K, they got a lot more interest and views than my Quest stuff, and still do, but is it actual interest, or just the algorithm?
LOL–“duh” on my part–I guess I need to look more closely. That said, I’ve seen examples of the new particle system that look similar to that, so that’s why I wondered.
Because it can be hit-and-miss, I don’t use notification on any YT channel I’m subscribed to, instead I go through them manually a few times a week by scrolling through my subscription list on my TV’s YT app.
As I explained before, you can “fake” certain fluid stuff. This particular waterfalls sim, however, was calculated back in May 2024, which was, if I recall correctly, before those modifiers were added to the C4D particle system that allow you to fake some of the fluid stuff.
I get that. It’s enough work just figuring out C4D without going to another program. As happens, I’m right now struggling trying to fake a fluid sim of sorts: I have a ship on an “ocean” created on a plane with a combo of Displacer and Displacement, with a Collision deformer “in” the boat to displace water and leave a bit of a wake, but I’m struggling with faking a bow wave–just some bubbling foam being kicked up by the prow. I tried a Particle Emitter with Volume Builder (not seen here–this is without any sim) and that seemed okay, but I can’t seem to get the particles to shrink toward the end of the simulation like you were able to do with the old system–there must be a way, but there are too many settings, and some of them seem to work backwards. It doesn’t have to be too realistic, since it’s from a distance, and I’m okay with a somewhat stylized look. Any advice welcome!
yes I see the attempt you made for foam and spray but from that height there would be no “solid” water visible after falling a certain Distance until it collected at the bottom.
Assuming your little red guy is six feet tall so by my estimation that entire cliff face is at least 100 meters tall
(if not more)
Most of that water would be reduces to mist
by the time it reaches bottom made worse so
by the many impacts along the way further reducing its droplet sizes
According to ChatGPT:
“At What Height Does This”mistification” Happen?
Small Waterfalls (~10-20 m): Minimal mist, mostly from splashing.
Medium Waterfalls (~50-100 m): Some water breaks into mist mid-air.
Tall Waterfalls (100+ m): A significant portion of the falling water turns into mist before reaching the bottom. - Extreme Waterfalls (300+ m, like Angel Falls): Water can completely turn into mist before reaching the ground, especially in warm climates.”
But to be fair realistic water you see in Hollywood films is always done with some proprietary in house system.
This Movie failed at the Box office but
I enjoyed it and LOVED the water effects by ILM
Actually, that is something I’m also pondering in the back of my mind. Since a “real” (i.e. particle based) fluid simulation is not feasible on such a large-scale scene, some workflow with a displaced plane seems called for. The problem is how to combine that with particle effect for bow waves and spray. The particles would have to interact with the ocean plane. I haven’t figured out a way to do that yet, either. However, this is something I want to revisit, because I’d like to re-do this test render some day:
Years ago, I saw bow waves and the wake being made by adding additional displacement textures into the shader for the ocean plane. But that is not very realistic either and may require the textures to be “dynamic”.
Actually, that is something I never considered (did not check any references or ask an AI).
I don’t know how tall the cliff is, but the water is not in “free fall” for the entire height, it’s more a series of smaller waterfalls than a single one from a great height (the water is in contact with the rock for much of the way down).
As far as I know, the “foam and spray” system in XP does not support mistification based on height out of the box, but I suppose, it might be possible to introduce conditions under which the water changes from being water to become spray and back to water again when it pools at the bottom. But, as I said, I hadn’t given this any thought previously.
There is one more thing: the size of the individual water/spray particle. For the simulation to work, both need to be the same size during the simulation (but not necessarily when rendered). Currently, this simulation uses a particle radius of 3 cm (i.e. 6 cm across) and during some frames there are 6.7 million particles in the sim. So having a smaller (i.e., more realistic) “droplet” size of say 0.5 cm in diameter would probably exceed VRAM capacity and make the simulation not feasible on “home” equipment. Also, the meshing of the water already takes about 2.5 minutes per frame (the meshing is CPU-based); I don’t want to know how long it would take with, say, 10 billion particles if that could be done at all on a PC.
