Lava Lamp Metaball Critique

Hi all!

Inspired by the soothing movement of lava lamps, I started messing around with metaballs and would love some feedback on what I can do to make it look more realistic.

I’m still a little green and am having issues with what node is being read out to the render node so I’m wrangling with that. I feel like the geo3 node’s components are a lot more what I was aiming for.

Would also love pointers on the actual coloring of it so there’s a bit more dimensionality to it.

Thanks!
lavaLamp.18.toe (7.79 KB)

I think you will want to pimp up the materials applied to your geos, as now they only apply flat colors. The phong mat is really powerful and its default settings are already good to start with. You can also acheive nice results with the PBR mat and its rim lights.

Here are some explanation about what the render top does and how to use it: matthewragan.com/2014/06/24/ren … hdesigner/

Your camera parameter in the render is set to “light1” which is causing the stretched rendering, you should rather use cam1 and maybe change your camera’s position.

Cheers!

hey svang,

Metaballs are pretty expensive - in fact most ops in the SOP family get processing intensive once you start manipulating them in real time. To get some sweet sweet lava lamp goodness, you might consider a ray-marching approach instead. Mike Walczyk has a great starter tut here about this:
michaelwalczyk.com/blog/

He’s also been doing some killer work with ray marching that you can look at to see how it looks:
instagram.com/p/BgCYWO2DRom … y=mwalczyk
instagram.com/p/BVsst-XHsF- … y=mwalczyk

Thanks for the pointers upalmucha! Reading up more on phongs.

Oh how wonderful, this really opens up a new world – was kind of scared of writing shaders but this is a great intro. Will mess around with this (and probably ask questions soon! :wink: )