Exploding liquid

[Nerox]

I'm brianstorming on how to achief a result like the attached image, imagine it like a exploding liquid sphere.

In terms of the simulation, I was thinking about having a initial liquid sphere and blowing it apart with a force from it's center.

Is this a proper approach, or are there better solutions to tackle this in a controllable manner?

[Netvudu]

I´m thinking it would be much easier to use particles, and then apply a force to them to make them explode apart and then apply the Particle Surface SOP over them. That´s the way I would do it...

[jujoje]

Off the top of my head I can think of a few ways to do this. Just to throw them out there:

1. POP Networks

The most obvious way to approach this is just to use a pop network rather than actually simulating it. The nice thing is that it would give you a fair amount of control over the shape of the liquid, and you can also use multiple particle networks with different emitters to add detail and then just combine them and use the particle surfacer to get a nice looking surface.

2. Particle Fluid DOP

You could use the SPH particles in dops and a magnet force to explode them. Which is I guess what you were thinking from what you said in your post. The nice thing about this is that you should be able to get a nice looking fluid from this with minimum fuss. However the simulation might take a little while. I thing the best bet would be to simulate it several times with different seed values and then combine the simulations and once again combine them and then surface them with the particle fluid surface node.

3. Voxel fluid

You could try using the voxel fluid to simulate this, but I think that you might not be able to get enough detail. I one way to it would be to use a low res voxel sim to advect particles. This way you should get something nicely fluid looking without much simulation time, and you can tweak the motion of the particles in pops.

I kinda agree with Netvudu, in that using pops would be the easiest and most controllable way to approach this.

[Nerox]

Of cource! A little twist in my brain didn't allow me to look at it this way. ;-)

I think a fairly simple voxel sim in combination with several particle sims, indeed could do the job. On the other hand SPH particles might give a better result.

Any way, thanks a lot. You guy's got me heading in the right direction.

Nick