Animated globs of water?

[Chris Johnson]

So I need to animate a bunch of globs of water coming together to form a pill. Someone suggested animating a bunch of metaballs coming together but this will just look like a bunch of spheres coming together as opposed to globes ow water organically sucking together to form a pill. Is there an animated deformer I could run over the surface of the convert meta to mkae it look a little more organic? I need to artistically control the placement of each droplet and the timings of them coming together. So hand animated. But I'd like to mkae the surface look a little more fluid like then the simple Meta Mesh.

Something similar top the opening of this...but bigger random globs...

http://vimeo.com/22400252

Thoughts?

Edited June 27, 2013 by Chris Johnson

[Skybar]

I just threw this together quick, but maybe something like this? And then play it backwards.

You don't have the same control you would have with separate objects and handanimating them; but I guess you could replace the initial particles with hand animated points or something.

blobsish.hipnc

[bloomendale]

you can create bunch of control points (or nulls if you want control on object level), animate them. Then create points around each control one and use them in flip simulation, transfer velocity from control points (with some noise etc). Add some sort of surface tension force (using existing microsolver or build simpler one pushing and pulling flip points along surface field gradient based on curvature of the surface field - this will give you some deformations).

[Chris Johnson]

I just hand animated a bunch of Meta balls and and put a mountain sop on it....looks passable...the very low tech version. ; )