RealFlow3 User Tutorial Competition.



Below are links to all the new user tutorials that entered in our competition on the forum, along with brief descriptions and comments, plus a rating out of 5 stars. The rating is based on such aspects as judged quality of content, explanatory detail, focus on RF (versus another 3D app), clarity and effectiveness of presentation, and the amount of downloadable resources.

Congratulations to Toby Evetts and his wonderful “Pouring Chocolate” tutorial! You will be receiving your prize shortly, and the first 4 runners up will also receive some Next Limit goodies!

Thanks to all those who contributed, making this an impressive set of learning resources from beginners to advanced levels – great work!

THE WINNER OF THE FIRST TUTORIAL CONTEST! (June 6, 2005)
[ENGLISH] Kallipigous’ tutorial on pouring chocolate to form a bar. This excellent and well presented tutorial captures the real workflow of a RF project and covers a classic commercial application. It describes very well the experimental process of getting things looking right in a reasonable period of time, and various extremely useful tricks that all RF users need to know about – such as using low res proxy objects, experimenting with low res fluids, using binary loaders for improving meshing, and on-the-fly adjustments to get things right (rather than full re-simulations). All resource files available for download. Good for beginners to advanced.
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[[ENGLISH] skram’s tutorial on pouring fluid into a glass, including interaction with ice cubes. Covers moving between RF3 and Cinema4D, and back again; covers basic RF setup, giving a significant amount of explanatory detail on aspects of emitters such as resolution, fluid-object interaction dynamics, and meshing. Resource files available for download.
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[ENGLISH] Skyros’ cool tutorial on a “dog” (actually a bottle animated like a dog) shaking off a layer of mud; for RF2.5 and 3ds max 6.0, but the same techniques will hold for RF3. A very nice commercial example with good description of the workflow, giving insight into how more advanced users work – such as, splitting up the job into chunks and re-using bin files to avoid further sims. Resource files available for download. Another near winner!
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[ENGLISH] johannm’s tutorial on generating wetmaps and using them in Maya 6.0. This tutorial is a really excellent resource for Maya users, and most any RF user will find the RF section worth looking at. The download brings you a very nicely written and presented 22-page pdf explanation, as well as RF and Maya resource files and a small rendered movie clip of the result. A near-winner, only losing out because the focus was more Maya than RF!

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[ENGLISH] Will Cameron’s website has 3 tutorials focused on RF3 and Lightwave, covering basic fluid dynamics, fluid-object interactions, and filling and knocking over a container. Possibly more to be added! Tut01 is on getting an object (water tank) from Lightwave to RF and back again, and sets up a project to pour water into the tank. One good and slightly unusual feature is the discussion of RF’s options panel, e.g. for autosaving; another feature is the discussion of rendering within Lightwave. Tut02: builds on the same scene, adding a ball whose motion is controlled by the flow of fluid into the tank. Tut03: bringing an animated glass and table from Lightwave into RF, filling the glass with fluid and relaxing it, then running so the glass falls over and the fluid pours out.


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[GERMAN] shark95 provides 2 tutorials in German, covering RF and it’s use with Cinema4D. Tut01: this is really 3 little tutorials on rigid and soft body dynamics. Covering rigid and soft body dynamics basics, and also a little on constraints and impulse. Gives an overview of getting objects into RF from Cinema4D and back again, including deforming objects. Tut02: Not so much a tutorial as a quick tour and tips on a number of aspects, such as how various of the daemons work, and getting RF particles into Cinema4D using Thinking Particles.


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[ENGLISH AND GERMAN] shark95 provides another tutorial, giving a step by step on how to import bin files from RF to Lightwave 8, and do basic rendering.


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[ENGLISH AND GERMAN] shark95’s tutorial for lightwave for mixing fluids, in both English and German A step by step for getting an object from Lightwave into RF, setting up a simulation, getting back to Lightwave, and rendering one version of the mixing between two separate liquids. Note: Use of ~collision daemon appears to be a mistake and shark95 will be revising. Resource files available.


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[ENGLISH AND GERMAN] shark95’s tutorial on a liquid text logo, great for beginners. Goes over importing a text object from Lightwave to RF and setting up with a fill-deform emitter to mimic the text (rather than gradually forming the text by fluid flow).


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[GERMAN] 3 beginner-level German tutorials by TheFman, using RF with Cinema4D – one about basic flow, another about RealWave features, and a third about foam textures on RealWave surfaces (Note: this describes using realwave particles and meshing them, rather than foam maps).


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[ENGLISH] TheFman's video tutorial on creating a fountain. Nice illustration of the use of a bounded gravity daemon. Good for beginners.


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[ENGLISH] rizon’s tutorial on droplets on a surface. A brief but well organized tutorial, covering the creation of droplets in RF using a simple object emitter, where the object’s texture is used as an emission mask. The steps in the word document description go from creating the texture in illustrator to producing the meshes. Includes all needed files for download.


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[ENGLISH] InTheCity’s tutorial on bringing rf particles into c4d and skinning with meatballs. A very nice tutorial for Cinema4D users, which goes through a simple RF scene setup and then gives good detail on how to use the bin files of particles directly in C4D as Thinking Particles, using Next Limit’s free particle loader node, plus meshing in C4D using the built-in metaball capabilities in an intelligent way. The C4D features described are some of the lesser known, making this a good contribution. The only reason the grading is not higher is because the emphasis is more on Cinema4D than RF.


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[GERMAN] c4dobiwan’s contribution of a tutorial in German, using RF and Cinema4D. A nice tutorial on setting up a scene in RF using rigid body dynamics, to bowl over some pegs with a ball. Shows in good detail how to move the objects from Cinema4D to RF, set up the sim, and get the dynamics back into RF. Note that there are a few directions which are not entirely necessary, for example there is no need to save out vertex info in the export from C4D, and no need to select each object for dynamics export.


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[GERMAN] c4dobiwan’s video tutorial on moving between RF3 and XSI 4, covering mostly rigid body dynamics in RF3.


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[ENGLISH] kosso_olli’s tutorial on generating wetmaps in Cinema4D, a simple and effective description. It’s worth reading the whole thread to catch some of the nuances of this procedure.


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[ENGLISH] Thanh’s pdf tutorial. A brief but well illustrated description of a basic RF setup for pouring a fluid.


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Do you have an idea for a new tutorial?
Do you have a request for a specific tutorial you’d like to see made?
Next Limit intends to give away a license and other goodies in a tutorial contest like this every 2 months. Start thinking and if you’d like to suggest a tutorial visit the special section in our user forum here