Toon shaded fluids

Oddne put this music video on facbook and it's truely amazing.

IS TROPICAL - THE GREEKS (official music video) from EL NINO on Vimeo.

I wondered whether the explosions were actually hand drawn, but I couldn't find any information on how they did it. Anyhow, I decided to give toon shaded 3D fluids a go.



I didn't spend much time on the actual simulation, so it can obviously look much better. But the main thing is that it didn't take any time at all. In order to get a nice smooth result, the mesh resolution has to be quite low, which means that the mesh generation doesn't take long (almost realtime on my old machine). Rendering was extremely quick (3min for 48 frames on production settings and full 720p resolution). To draw that by hand, would have probably taken me a few hours (and it still would notlook good) Doing it in Maya can easily be set up and rendered within half an hour and look really nice.