Glass simulation

[josemendez]

Hello, I need some help with a project.

I need to simulate melted glass for simulation of glass-making. I already tried with Obi Fluid, but I understood while searching in the forum, that Obi Fluid can't simulate "solid" fluids.

So I tried with Obi softbody, but I can't achieve niether the "slow" deformation of the glass, nor its texture. I tried to recreate the effect of the plastic deformation of the dragon figurine (like in the demo video od Obi Softbody 4) on a ball, but I'm far from a good result.

Can you tell me if melted glass simulation could be possible with Obi ? I already know this is a challenge, since glass is both liquid and solid.

Thank You

Hi Sylnor,

Melted glass is really difficult to simulate properly, more so in realtime, as it is a very high-viscosity fluid (or a really plastic solid). So it kind of sits in between. Most existing methods specialize on either end of the spectrum, to be able to simplify the simulation and achieve good performance.

Simulating it as a particle-based fluid is not really possible, as extremely high viscous fluids are only stable with very small timesteps. The smaller the timestep, the worse the performance, so not realtime anymore. This is true for pretty much all fluid simulators, realtime or not: high viscosity tends to be more expensive to simulate.

Simulating it as a softbody could be easier, assuming its topology (its "shape") won't change a lot. If you need to start with say, a dragon, and end up with a slightly deformed dragon, it's ok. But if you need the dragon to slowly melt and turn into a puddle, completely losing its original shape, it's not possible.

"True" melting objects are best simulated with hybrid grid/particle methods, such as MPM, which are able to simulate the entire range from completely solid to inviscid liquid using the same method:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jADc_m4-MVY

unfortunately, there's no way to do this in realtime yet, no matter what engine you use.