New Mac Pro / 3D / Animating Water?

[Nicholas Mosher]

I'm an engineering student, and this year I decided to take a couple courses in 3D modeling and animation. We're using Maxon Cinema 4D in class, and I'm blown away by it's capabilities. I really can't wait to start using this software for visualizations in my engineering courses.

Being a Macbook and iPhone owner, I've been eye-balling the Mac Pros for awhile now. Now that I'm using Cinema 4D, I decided to purchase a powerful home workstation to accommodate the ever increasing processing power I seem to require. Placed the order today...

Two 2.8GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon Harpertown CPUs
2GB 800MHz DDR2 ECC Memory
500GB 7200-rpm SATA 3GB/s HDD
NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT 512MB GPU
Two 16x SuperDrives
Airport Extreme Wireless Card
Apple Mighty Mouse & Keyboard
23" 1920x1200 Apple Cinema Display
3-yr Apple Care Warranty

I need to order a few more gigabytes of ECC RAM when my bank account recovers, hopefully jump from 2 to 8 via New Egg.

The one thing I've seem to hit a wall with is modeling/animating water. Have any of you artists used the software package Real Flow 4? I'd be interested in hearing your experiences and opinions. I'm interested in Environmental Engineering, so water is a focus of my studies. I'd like to accurately model/animate flows in channels, drains, and large pools that are being agitated by big paddle wheels on the surface, and/or diffusers (similar to a fish-tank bubbler).

 

[motoxpress]

I only have experience with Maya's water tools but, I have heard very good things with Realflow. It was used for the opening titles in Sweeny Todd for the blood flowing down...creepy

Congrats on a glorious monster. That MacPro will be your favorite asset.

-mx

 

[Mac Kiwi]

Real flow is an awesome fluid simulator,myself I do not like their exorbitant pricing/licensing structure.


For C4D you may be able to get away with using this http://www.add-the-sea.de/eng/ I used to use it years ago,cant tell you if its improved a lot or not,you could also try particle emitters or TP for the diffusers you talked about.


You will love the completely reworked GI in ver 11....also check out Projection Man,was developed for Image works for matte painting.


I also have a system very similar to yours but with 16g of ram,really flies in C4D.

 

[Jim Campbell]

Realflow is establishing itself as something of an industry standard, I believe and is excellent. Expensive, but excellent.

Note that you will need plug-ins (free from NextLimit when you purchase Realflow) to get your simulations back into C4D for rendering.

Cheers!

Jim

 

[Nicholas Mosher]

Thanks for the responses. I think I will try and get a student license of RF4 - it's less than $200 I believe.

I've never tried moving the Mac Pro I use at school, but I just got the tracking number and shipping info for mine... 60 pounds!

Unfortunately it's in California, I'm in Massachusetts, and it's not scheduled for delivery until Halloween...

Screen is arriving today.