Pouring Water on Lemon

In this project I strived to create a realistic fluid simulation. 

Sweets, fruits, basically food in general has been a hot topic in the past few years when it comes to rbd and fluid simulations - which I do not mind one bit. Personally, I quite enjoy them, they offer a certain level of satisfaction in my opinion. I decided to go in that direction with the project myself.

I scrolled through the food section of Quixel Bridge to find a scan that is closest to what I had in mind. I chose a lemon asset, as I wanted to go for a tropical vibe, and I also managed to find fitting textures for the background. Since I aimed for the feeling of freshness, which is why I did not have a single doubt about the fluid's shader.

Main steps of the process:

The simulation was made in Houdini, rendered using Redshift, and composited in DaVinci Resolve.

Simulation:

In this project I chose a rather minimalistic approach. A simple animation on the lemon, which is then used as the (deforming) collision object. A similarly plain animation on the sphere, - using sine and cosine functions in the transform nodes, driven by the frame number, - which was used as the source of the simulation. In the dopnet no forces were applied, except for gravity.

Lighting:

When it comes to realistic CG water perhaps the most essential part of the render setup is lighting. 

In this particular project I used a couple of lights to achieve the final result. Firstly I added the key light to seperate the main focus of the render, the lemon and the water from the background. Then I added a fill light to have the background evenly lit as well. This was followed by the rimlight and an extra pair of lights on the left and right side of the main focus area, to have nicer reflections on the water. After that I just had to go through a number of iterations, going back and forth till I was happy with the result. 

I think the key with rendering/lighting liquid is to find the right balance, when there's enough light but the scene is still not overlit.