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Liquid Simulations

Royal Academy of Art The Hague · 3D Lab · 2018 · Concept and development

Five 3D prints on a white surface: two branching grey forms, a small gold one, a clear resin cluster of beads and a white block breaking into coral-like growth
Five prints, five processes.

Fluid simulations, stopped at a single frame and 3D printed. Made in the 3D Lab of the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague.

RealFlow is made for film, built to look convincing rather than to be correct. I wanted to see how close it gets to nature anyway. Closer than I expected: varying viscosity and the force of collisions, one simulation kept producing shapes that had nothing to do with liquid, an anthill, a tree crown. None of it was modelled.

I set up the liquids and how they collide, and RealFlow calculates the rest. I pick one frame, close it into a mesh and print it.

Ten meshed frames of one simulation in a row on black, drawn flat without perspective under a cool key light and an orange rim light: a small spiky ball on the left grows frame by frame into a tall, lumpy bell on the right
One test run, every fourth frame from 4 to 40.

The brief was to try two or so of the lab’s printers. I used all five, and each made something different of the same kind of shape. A Prusa needs supports under overhangs, and the fine parts break off when they come away. The Z-Printer works in powder and needs none, so it could print the thin, hollow forms the others couldn’t, which is why its prints became vessels.

The prints are the work. The renders are documentation, made in Cinema 4D with subsurface scattering, so light enters the surface a little before it bounces back, as with skin. Without it, a shape this soft looks like plastic.

A render of the particles mid-simulation: a cube of white beads breaking apart and spraying outward
Simulation, the particles before meshing.
A render of the meshed simulation close up: overlapping pale spheres fused into one soft surface against black
Rendering, side #1.
A render of the same particles meshed into one lumpy white solid, a cube face still visible on one side
Rendering, side #2.

One of the Z-Printer pieces was sold as a small vase.

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