HySPH - Display

RealFlow provides a wide variety of different settings to visualize specific properties of a fluid. The settings under “Display” can be edited for each emitter separately and give you interesting and valuable information about a fluid or even a particle’s attributes. Different colours can also be used to mimic a certain behaviour or fluid type, e.g. fire or dust.

Visible

You can choose between “Yes” and “No” to show or hide the emitter. Since the associated particles will also be hidden, this feature is perfectly suited if you want to monitor the motion of other nodes behind the fluid. You can also select multiple nodes and make them invisible in one pass.

Detail

You can choose between 5 different levels of detail to display the particle cloud: "Draft", "Low", "Medium", "High" and "Best".

Display type

You can choose whether you want to display the fluid particles as points or spheres. With “Sphere” you can already get an impression of what the meshed fluid cloud will look like. If you do not want to disable the viewport during a simulation (Alt + D) we recommend using the “Point” mode, because it takes some time to draw the shaded spheres. The “Arrow” mode is interesting if you want to visualize a property (e.g. velocity) in the form of arrows of variable length. This can be important for debugging operations and scripting, because you will immediately recognize misbehaving particles. 

Size

Here you can determine the radius of the points or spheres that are used to represent the fluid particles in the viewport. The base length of the arrows is also controlled with this parameter. Values smaller than 1.0 are also allowed.

Show icon

Each emitter is represented by an icon in the viewport and you can enable/disable it here.

Particle %

With this value it is possible to adjust the number of particles displayed in the viewport. You can enter any percentage. With a value of 50.0, for example, only one half of the total particle amount is shown. This function does not influence the number of stored particles in the cache files. “Particle %” also works with previews in Maxwell Render.

Property

RealFlow calculates fluids on many physical data. With “Property” you can make some of them visible. The range of values for each property will be colour-coded with “Min range” and “Max range”. 

Automatic range

“Yes” is the standard setting to create the colour gradient between “Min range” and “Max range”. The colours appropriate are shown in the “Min and Max range colour" fields.

Please do not forget that the values are not normalized and this can lead to flickering effects while playing back the simulation. To avoid this it is necessary to apply a normalizing script in a post process. Such a script analyses the entire particle sequence and limits the desired value to range between 0 and 1. This method is not only used in RealFlow, but also in other 3D applications to avoid shading problems because of huge differences, for example in velocity or pressure.

Min/Max range

Lets you 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 “Min/Max range color”. When a fluid’s attribute only has mean differences you will hardly see a colour range. With ranges you should aim for better visual differentiation.

Min/Max range color

You can select custom colours for the representation of the “Min and Max range” values. Clicking on the colour fields opens a picker from your operating system and you can choose any available colour from the RGB palette. This feature is often used to mimic certain fluid types, like oil, coffee, fire or similar.

Max range clamp color

The easiest way to explain this colour is to give an example: let's say, the “Max range” value is set to 7.5 and the used “Property” is “Velocity”. This means that all particles with exactly this velocity will be dyed with the colour specified under “Max range color”. Now, let's further assume that the highest velocity in the simulation is not 7.5, but 11.2. In this case, all particles with velocities between 7.51 and 11.2 are displayed with colour defined here – by default that is white.