Unreal Fluids

This weekend I played around with Unreal's Niagara Fluids. 🔥 It was relatively quick to set up and very fun to play with. The basic workflow was to set up a Niagara particle sim first to get the basic movement, then attach Fluid attributes that the 2nd part of the sim would read. I struggled getting any sort of detail out of it, I really missed having a Disturbance control that helps to break up the fluid's edges like you have in Houdini. Of course, I could have just missed some basic control that let's you do that. Or maybe I shouldn't have done a shot where I needed to be so close to the source. You can see the particles pop into existence on his hands, even when I tried to have them scaled down when they're just born. It's very fun doing everything in context, seeing the lighting changes and the general speed of the whole process. The obvious downside is that it's still fairly low detail (but maybe that was just me not pushing it as far as I could). Shout-out to Redefinefx's free quick-start course, which helped me get up to speed quickly. I rendered it out with Lumen and then again with the Pathtracer. Pretty similar, the main difference was more accurate shadows and the wild bounce light that Pathtracer had with the smoke. It'll be interesting to see how the tools evolve over the next few releases.