SluiceGate.png

Sluice Gate

Oh damn!

This is probably the biggest fluid sim I’ve attempted yet, but I think it’s turned out pretty well! 

I really wanted to make an industrial style animation where I could incorporate a nice fluid simulation so I decided to make a sluice gate cut-away. When I was travelling around New Zealand I was fascinated by the scale and engineering of all of the various dams so a project like this seemed appropriate. This also means I have a lot of reference imagery to look at from my photos so I thought it would be a good idea!

Initially I modelled the terrain using a similar setup to my waterfall generator but constructed it in a way that I had a raised area for the sluice gates themselves and a lower area for a pre-existing lake. The sluice gates were modelled from reference photos. I kept the sluice gate geometry fairly basic as the main focus was the fluid sim, but the gates themselves are accurate to how a real sluice gate is constructed.

For the simulation I created two pools of water utilising booleans to subtract them from preexisting geometry. One pool is the main lake below and the other is hidden behind the gates.

I created an animation control for the gates so I could open them independently and at a realistic speed.

The concrete walls around the gates didn’t need any particular tweaks to get them ready to act as colliders for the water sim, however I had to create invisible stand-ins for the gates themselves to avoid any leaks around the edges. They are similar to the primary shape except heavily extruded and scaled up slightly in the horizontal axis to intersect the walls.

I broke down each section of the geometry for texturing but the primary colours for the terrain are driven by attributes that were created when the geometry was generated. Such as mossy areas and rocky walls.

The sim itself is largely uncomplicated, with a few tweaks here and there to get the water to behave realistically. I was pleasantly surprised by the bow wave that is created when the primary water source hits the secondary.

There is a whitewater simulation atop the main fluid sim that adds a few extra details to the final effect including bubbles and a bit of surface foam.

As always, a tidy scene file, is a happy scene file!