Create a Realistic Water Simulation

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Whether you like it shaken or stirred, Cycles and the Fluid Simulator tastes delicious.

Length:
37 minutes
Software:
Blender Cycles Build r41599
Difficulty:
Advanced
Rate:
VN:F [1.9.17_1161]
Rating: 4.8/5 (291 votes cast)

In this tutorial you will discover:

  • Realistic fluid settings
  • Water and glass materials for Cycles
  • How to model ice cubes and puddles

Up until now blender’s fluid simulator has kind of been a waste of time. Sure the fluid looked okay in the viewport, but when it came to rendering the internal renderer did a horrible job. The complex properties of water meant that it simply couldn’t create realistic results. However, thanks to the new physically accurate rending engine Cycles, we can have fluid that actually looks half decent.

Enter into a new era of realistic water and glass.

Finished Result

Realistic Water Simulation in Blender

Pour yourself a glass of Cycles

The image is based off this concept from iStockPhoto.

At a Glance

Screenshots from the video:

Further Inspiration

Not sure where to take this tutorial? Check out the links below for more fluid inspiration:

Create something cool with this tutorial? Post it below! I’m keen to see your results :)

Create a Realistic Water Simulation, 4.8 out of 5 based on 291 ratings

About Andrew Price

User of Blender for 9+ years. I've written tutorials for 3d World Magazine and spoken at three Blender conferences. My goal is to help artists get employed in the industry by making training accessible and easy to understand. I'm an Aussie and I live in South Korea ;)
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  • Guest

    Thanks Andrew! You’re awesome!

  • Kamen Nedelchev

    Thank you for tutorial. I try it and this is it.

  • Jonathan Deik

    So, after tons of tutorials in the last 2 weeks to get myself knowledge in Blender to begin with (I have used student copies of 3DS Max in the past so the learning curve for Blender was huge, but doable after a lot of youtube watching).. I finally decided to come back to one of Andrew’s great tutorials since I know my way around Blender pretty good now (after about 90 HOURS of tutorials!!!). I wanted to make a glass that more closely resembled the cheap glassed I have in my kitchen, so I did verticle loop cuts and edge grabbing instead of the horizontal ribs Andrew creates. This is my result.

  • http://www.facebook.com/simplecastic Kishon Diaz

    its my first render period i know i need more practice thank you blender guru / Andrew price

  • Zippo_Poland

    Thanks, it is great :)

  • http://www.facebook.com/simplecastic Kishon Diaz

    how do i make the domain cube invisible its in the way

  • lkm

    ok,this is mine.

  • http://www.facebook.com/azaotl Eduardo Jesus Moroni Nuño

    THANK you very much !! Andrew.. I’m just new about blender… and now things look clearer (in blender)… I did this one… took like 2 hours in my slow-lap machine jaja

  • Dileep

    Thankyou Andrew,

    A little trick to remove the weird fluid geometry.

    Instead of freezing the fluid and smoothing out the jagged surface, before baking the sim make a copy of the outer surface of the glass and use it as the fluid’s obstacle. Make a copy of the inner surface and use it as target in boolean modifier (difference) with the domain object after baking the simulation(blender will crash if you boolean before baking the sim). This will remove the jagged outer part. If you try this you might want to vary the distance between the two surfaces using the Shrink/Flatten tool according to the resolution of the sim. Also make a very very tiny space between the boolean’d fluid and the render-able glass by shrinking the inner surface of the glass to avoid artefacts due to intersections.

    This way you can leave with the whole animation intact with no sculpting involved, but with a small discrepancy in the final volume of the fluid, which is almost unnoticeable.

  • Sebas

    I have a random stray line of fluid, as shown by the photo, that does not show up on the rendered Viewport mode, any Fix?

  • Bruno From Brazil

    Hey andrew, i`d like to ask you one thing, how do i take that noise from the render of the imagem in cycles

  • wodloo

    how do i get rid of the grainyness

    • http://www.facebook.com/ResidentSeven Jonathan Day

      In the render setting you need to increase the “samples” to 1000 or more.

  • wodloo

    so here is my collosal fail.

    In the end

    >no matter wate fram the water would stay the same as frame 12

    >the render looked soo grainy it wasent funny

    >and it would not even render the water

    Great tut though i just suck

  • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=502607090 Thai Danh

    Had a craving for whiskey so I whipped this one up real quick.

  • Jonathan

    I’m a little late to the party, but awesome tutorial Andrew. I kinda went a bit mad and did a couple of variations.

  • William Alphonso

    Mine is not realy cool but I think I juste miss somthing on the flore but if u can help my that would be great :P thanks in advance :)

    • http://www.facebook.com/julian.meier.503 Julian Meier

      Same problem here :( did u find help?

      • http://www.facebook.com/julian.meier.503 Julian Meier

        i got it.
        Your floor -> Materlials ->shader the first shader (glossy) needs roughness 0.0
        and the second shader(diffuse) gets 0.05

        • Joe

          Thanks, I had the same problem

  • Fabian Geier

    Great tutorial! Thank you for that ;) !

  • Fabian Geier

    Very cool Tutorial! Thanks !!

  • Jakub
  • Hemzok

    I’ve tried to make gradient without bending issue. That’s what I’ve achieved, it’s bit noisy but the bends are barely noticeable.

  • Cedrick Walker

    how about a bottle of bubbly ?

  • http://www.facebook.com/ReliC426 Russell Craig

    Greetings Andrew,

    This was my first attempt at diving into Blender aside from some basic interface tutorials, and I must say I’m amazed at the end product I was able to produce following your excellent tutorial. I come from a software development background where any ‘artwork’ I produce (outside of code) makes stick figures look good. You’ve helped to show me that traditional (read: hand-drawn/painted) artistic skills, while extremely helpful, are not necessarily required to produce good results.

    Thanks for the great tutorials, and keep on Blending!

  • Help

    Thanks again for your tutorials. I have started making my own fluid simulation that I wish to process into an movie(avi or whatever). I get the simulation to work but every time I render the water (fluid) comes out very dark black in much of the scene. I have tried adjusting various lights/lamps/and even trying environment lighting but it keeps coming out black.

    Any help would be appreciated, until then Ill keep messing with settings, buttons, tabs, and materials :)

  • Thanks

    Thanks Andrew! You have no idea how much you helped me out.

  • Artur

    Good day Andrew, nice tutorial, thank you.

  • Eric

    This was an awesome tutorial! Here’s my finished result

  • hermallorn

    I am doing a fluidsim very like the waterfall in the nature academy and the fluidsim keeps crashing (just stop at first frame) when i increase resolution more than 120. (bakes 100 frames in just 15sec at resolution 120, so it is not a system problem). Does anyone have the same issue? I am using Blender2.65a

  • Anon

    Here have a background

  • http://www.facebook.com/alain.gonzales.585 Alain Gonzales

    Hello Andrew

    Great Tut, I used it and changed the material to lava or something like it

  • fred

    I’m having issues to get the fluid not going through my obstacle … in particular I’d like to get it animated – so sculpting is not really the way to go. Does anybody have other ideas to keep the water/wine in the innerpart of the glass?

  • cguns

    Hello good tutorial but you move very fast at times. haha

    I have one question if anyone is kind enough to answer it. For some reason whenever I render an image the glass of the cup always has speckles in it. I’ve adjusted all the material settings in almost every combination but nothing seems to fix the issue. Also how do I adjust the render output resolution.

    Help me please!

  • Gabe

    Hi there.. these are really great tutorials, I really appreciate it. This was my first try with Blender. I’m impressed by this application :)

    Is there any way to render the simulation as an animation without the distortions at the walls of the glass, when the water hits it? Haha.. do I need to do this by hand frame by frame with the sculpting brushes? ;) )

  • Hunter Stevens

    This is mine. It’s not that creative. but also my first attempt. Hope you guys like it!(:

  • http://www.facebook.com/michael.b.beatty.5 Michael Bean Beatty

    its refered to as eyeballin it ;)

  • Matt

    Another thing I found looked kinda nice is leaving smooth shading off on the glass. This is a very rough render, but it shows the effect

    • Matt

      Sorry, the image isn’t uploading properly

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