Fusion CI Studios

While creating photo-real tea in dancing glasses for Topsail in LA, Fusion got a chance to take one of the most iconic of CG fluid simulations - the ice cube + cocktail sim - to a new level .

VFX Supervisor, Mark Stasiuk, created a classic tutorial on this topic a loooong time ago for RealFlow v3 (remember the whiskey pour?!).  Although, in this case, the sim had a lot more to do than just float an ice cube.

For Teas' Tea, four glasses of tea dance happily in time to a catchy tune, spinning and tilting round and round on a turntable. The ice cubes jumble actively in the tea, the tea sloshes in the glasses.... but we were directed that it must never spill.  Of course! To beat physics at its own game we created a python-scripted deamon to make a cylindrically-symmetrical force field with highly controllable falloff, allowing the tea to move naturally in the glasses but whenever it tries to spill over the lip, it gets nudged gently back.

The resulting sims are rendered in mental ray using the tremendously flexible mia_x_passes shader. Oishii ! (Japanese for delicious!)