It’s steep for new buyers, and owners of version 1.0 don’t get much of a discount either (it’s €420 plus taxes at the time of writing).īut at half the price of the full RealFlow, while not exactly a bargain, it’s still a very useful addition to Cinema 4D’s growing armoury.

In terms of functionality, this new version of RealFlow | Cinema 4D is leagues ahead of the original, and the only barrier to entry is pricing. Hopefully, future versions will solve some of these issues. So while you can create some amazing simulations, it takes time and patience to get anything meaningful out the other end. The granular simulations are great, but limited by C4D’s ability to handle tens (or preferably hundreds) of thousands of objects. Object deformation with Particle Skinner.Multiple fluid interactions Force daemons use native C4D falloffs.New viscous, viscoelastic and granular materials.You’re often forced to do a preview render straight to screen to see the mesh – or cache the whole simulation. In use we only came across a few hurdles, one of which is the Mesher’s occasional habit of not Auto-Building meshes on playback, when you’re just previewing your sim or don’t want to spend time caching it.Īlso, sometimes meshes don’t render to the Picture Viewer, despite having cached the particles. This sequence shows how you can use the particle system in collision with a surface to deform an otherwise solid object There are a lot of learning materials available from Next Limit’s website to get you up to speed, but we wish there were some demo scenes to show off the features and take apart. But once you get your head round the options and learn the correct workflow, the plug-in is capable of producing excellent results, relatively quickly, depending on your system. It can be frustrating at times, and takes a lot of trial and error to get the result you’re after.

Certainly, at first, you can find yourself endlessly tweaking values, trying to balance speed, resolution, time steps, cell size, w mesh density etc, to get the fluids acting correctly and your meshes looking good. The biggest issue with RealFlow | Cinema 4D is really learning the multitude of controls and variables, and knowing which to use to make sure your simulation looks the way you want it to. It’s absolutely ideal for soft body-style effects, but with the control that different fluids systems provide, add a granular system and the results can be wonderfully unique. You fill a mesh body with particles, and the Skinner distorts the mesh according to the simulation. The inclusion of the Particle Skinner daemon is a pleasant surprise.

Realflow smoke tutorial