Realflow 2012 Hybrido breaking waves
A quick simulation of some crashing waves simulated in Realflow, rendered in 3DS Max and composited in Nuke.
It's the first time I've used Realflow 2012 or the Hybrido fluid solver. In fact the only time I've ever used Realflow before was version 4 which I found tended to crash if you looked at it the wrong way. This however turned out to be very fast to simulate compared to the standard fluid solver and was very stable. It did require a lot more steps to generate the supporting splashes and foam.
It was rendered in Mental ray using 3DS Max 2010, nothing fancy just a very basic set up. I ran the sims and rendering in different parts across two machines, mostly over night. As a result of this I don't really know how long it actually took to simulate. The rendering took about 6 minutes per frame on average.
Since this was my first time trying out all sorts of different techniques I did a few experiments. I've included a couple of comparisons taken from these at the end. The RFRK mesher was used for the final animation, but I did try out Thinkbox Frost as a mesher as well. The results are actually very similar, and it was just a judgement call to go with RFRK in the end.
You can also see how particle foam rendered with Krakatoa could look in comparison to mesh foam. Unfortunately there were nowhere near enough particles in the foam simulation to get a very good result, even with a lot of partitioning. I think with a much higher particle count you could get a pretty good result without ever needing to mesh.