Help Flow direction and baking

[josemendez]

1) Can a simulation be baked and replayed later for optimal performance (I need to simulate once and then nothing will change in the environment, so ideally I want to be able to replay it as an "animation" as opposed to a brand new simulation), however im not sure if it is even remotely possible to achieve.

There's no built-in way to bake the simulation. There used to be, but eventually the actual simulation became faster than playback of baked caches. Adding this to the fact that Alembic already allowed to import baked fluids into Unity, there no longer was any use for the baking system.

If you need baked fluid simulations, using Alembic is the way to go.

If you want/need to create your own baking system, you can store/set particle positions using the particle API:
http://obi.virtualmethodstudio.com/manua...icles.html

2) Can I force the liquid to travel up in a tube (maybe simulate pressure?). Changing gravity is not an option as I need the liquid to end up in a tank and behave normally. 

Pressure is already accounted for in the simulation. You could A) push the fluid (using a plunger/piston mechanism), or B) apply external forces to particles to move them the way you need. Again, this is done using the particle API to write values into the solver.externalForces array, see above.

kind regards