Asset Store purchase — missing useful examples, causing lost time

[kwikdawg]

*** Asset Store buyers want 1 thing primarily — buy asset pack, save time & money ***

Story as a game developer... have been *losing* time instead

Background:

Just needed 1 thing — pouring fluid from a bottle into a glass.

What happened:

Bought Obi Fluid asset pack — the title screen shows a beaker pouring into a glass. Perfect!

Planned to grab the beaker example and plug it in. Wait... no example of a beaker / glass exists?

Ok — what example exists? A faucet into a bowl.

Good — except the bowl is the scale of a swimming pool — my bottle and glass are normal sized

Here's where as a developer I spent a LOT of my time:

1- Many hours here "fiddling with parameters" on Obi to scale (not straightforward)
2- Searched and posted to forums for scaling issues (others struggling too)
3- Watched developer videos from Obi creator (amazing tech, not helping me though)

It's not that I gave up, probably could get it working — but, time is money — had to move to a less cool liquid simulation.

Obi Fluid could *easily* be a plug-and-play solution with examples like this:

1- Demos come at regular scale not 10x size
2- Examples are present for common uses like bottles and glasses
3- Default values for Obi classes start where they should start (have to change immediately)

Is the technology amazing? YES. Do I believe it can work? YES.

Is this saving time for busy developers? Unfortunately NO. The lack of common demos mean devs spend MORE time.

The technology is grand — but "aha" — please add better examples to save TIME for customers 

[josemendez]

*** Asset Store buyers want 1 thing primarily — buy asset pack, save time & money ***

Story as a game developer... have been *losing* time instead

Background:

Just needed 1 thing — pouring fluid from a bottle into a glass.

What happened:

Bought Obi Fluid asset pack — the title screen shows a beaker pouring into a glass. Perfect!

Planned to grab the beaker example and plug it in. Wait... no example of a beaker / glass exists?

Ok — what example exists? A faucet into a bowl.

Good — except the bowl is the scale of a swimming pool — my bottle and glass are normal sized

Here's where as a developer I spent a LOT of my time:

1- Many hours here "fiddling with parameters" on Obi to scale (not straightforward)
2- Searched and posted to forums for scaling issues (others struggling too)
3- Watched developer videos from Obi creator (amazing tech, not helping me though)

It's not that I gave up, probably could get it working — but, time is money — had to move to a less cool liquid simulation.

Obi Fluid could *easily* be a plug-and-play solution with examples like this:

1- Demos come at regular scale not 10x size
2- Examples are present for common uses like bottles and glasses
3- Default values for Obi classes start where they should start (have to change immediately)

Is the technology amazing? YES. Do I believe it can work? YES.

Is this saving time for busy developers? Unfortunately NO. The lack of common demos mean devs spend MORE time.

The technology is grand — but "aha" — please add better examples to save TIME for customers 

Hi there,

Sorry for your experience with Obi. The faucet/bucket sample scene is actually the one used for the asset "title screen", we simply swapped the bucket mesh with an erlenmeyer flask. The actual scene uses a bucket simply because the top opening is much wider, hence easier to fill.

Regarding scale, you can simply increase the fluid resolution. Or, rescale the solver. Note that very small particles will result in tunneling issues (as would with absolutely any physics engine). Here's a couple videos explaining scale and tunneling:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W0ojzG5dzjU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ms0Z35GY6pk

1- Demos come at regular scale not 10x size

x10 size compared to what? Most uses (enemy blood, secondary splashes, fluid puzzles, etc) will happen at or close to human scale. So particles are sized by default to fill around 1 cubic meter with 1000 particles, which ensures good performance for a typical game scale (a character height of around 1,8 meters). This can be changed by using a different fluid resolution though.

Code:

2- Examples are present for common uses like bottles and glasses

Actually this is not a common use case at all. Most users will need particle physics for fluid-based puzzles, secondary effects in shooters, etc. Filling a small glass might be common in engineering/VR simulations, but a particle-based engine is probably not the best bet in those situations due to its accuracy/performance ratio. To fill a bottle you don't really care about internal fluid dynamics, and the cost of completely packing a volume with particles is quite high (since the cost of the simulation scales with the amount of particle-particle interactions).

3- Default values for Obi classes start where they should start (have to change immediately)

The defaults were carefully chosen, so that they would suffice in common situations. A resolution of 1 fills 1 cubic meter with 1000 particles, low viscosity, moderately high surface tension, no atmospheric resistance, low vorticity... they all result in a water-like liquid at human scale. I understand you'd rather use different parameters in your case, but that's why they're parameters: to be adjusted in case you'd need to.