RealFlow fluids provides a wide variety of different settings to visualize specific properties. The settings under “RkViewer” can be edited for each sequence separately and give you interesting and valuable information about a fluid or even a particle’s attributes. Different colors can also be used to mimic a certain behaviour or fluid type, e.g. fire or dust. The mode of operation is very similar to the emitter and domain “Display” panels in RealFlow.
Update Mode
You can choose to update the viewport either automatically or manually.
Mode
Simply use one of the primitives and the desired channel colour will be applied to it.
Line/Point Size
Here you have the possibility to enhance the particles' visibility in the viewport.
Points Display %
This parameter works on a percentage basis: if your mesh contains 100,000 points, for example, then a "Level of detail" value of 50 will display around 50,000 points. Please note that this reduction only affects the mesh's quality in the viewport, not the final mesh when you start to render a scene.
Update Particles
If you want to update the viewport's particle view manually, please use this button.
Show Channel
Please choose a channel from the drop-down menu you want to display. With “None”, all particles are dyed with a single colour determined under “Particle Color” above.
Show Channel
It is also possible to visualize the channels. The desired channel can be selected here.
Color min/Color max
With these two colours it is possible to define the initial and final colours of a gradient. The shades between these colours are automatically interpolated.
Min Value/Max Value
Allows you to manually adjust the minimum and maximum value for the selected property. Values below or above “Min and Max range” will be visually clipped and represented with the appropriate “Start/End Color”. When a fluid’s attribute has only mean differences you will hardly see a colour range. With ranges you should aim for better visual differentiation.
Automatic Range
“Yes” is the standard setting to create the colour gradient between “Min Value” and “Max Value”. The appropriate colours are shown in the “Min and Max range colour" fields.
Current Min/Current Max
These read-only fields inform you about the current minimum and maximum values of the active channel.
Whole Sequence
If you want to visualize a channel with “Update Mode” set to “Automatically” you can decide whether only the current file is used for the calculation of the gradient, or the entire sequence. In the latter case, all files will be read an analysed to compute the channel's colour range. Let's say, the velocity range in the first file is between 5 and 30 m/s, and between 5 and 36 m/s in the second file. Without “Whole Sequence”, the particles with a velocity of 30 m/s will have different colours at each frame. With this option activated, the 30 m/s particles' colour will be exactly the same throughout the sequence.