EXP 001 // Dynamic Paint Liquid
I’ve always seen Dynamic Paint as one of those exotic things in Blender that could only be useful for one or two odd things.
Oh, how wrong I was
Here’s an experimental (ferro fluid?) liquid effect using displacements. The main displacement is controlled by an empty to create the wavy effect, while the voronois sticking out are controlled by vertex weights generated with dynamic paint. The fiery effect is also controlled by dynamic paint, using a paintmap. This is only the tip of what can be done with DP (yes, we’re on an initals basis now). There’s a multitude of options and possibilities when mixing DP with modifiers and drivers, and for texturing mixing painted canvases (vertex colors) with mix nodes and procedural textures.
One piece of advise this project brought back to me is to always bake your physics before starting a long render. Specially if you are rendering to a sequence and intend to stop it and resume later. If you don’t bake the physics, they will change and the sequence will break.
Not only that, then you will have to re-render the entire thing, since everything will have changed. Also note that objects can have more than one Dynamic Paint canvas, and each canvas has their own bake. Make sure you bake all canvases!
Note: This blend requires Blender 2.79 (RC). It also includes the Natron project file.