Intro to FLIP Fluids - Part 1: Getting Started [Blender Add-on Tutorial]

In this part 1 of Flip Fluids training for #Blender, we will explore the fundamental fluid objects and how they interact with each other. Then we will apply that knowledge and create a globe of water, swirling around a vortex force while whitewater particles are emitted. Enjoy and stay tuned for the next video in this series!
Part 2: • Intro to FLIP Fluids -...
Flip Fluids Plugin
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00:00 Intro
00:14 What is the Flip Fluids add-on for Blender?
00:59 Installation of the add-on
01:31 Getting started
01:46 Creating a domain
02:24 Inflow objects
03:43 Fluid objects
05:04 Outflow objects
06:04 Obstacle objects
06:35 Force objects
07:40 Globe vortex example
07:56 Setting the stage
09:43 Adding force objects
11:42 Adding whitewater particles
12:32 Animating world gravity and speed
13:36 Adding a camera
14:04 Increase simulation resolution
14:38 Adding lights and materials
16:55 Render previews
17:44 Final result
18:01 Close

[@ianmcglasham]

Clear and complete. Looking forward to more.

[@PetRatPro]

Great video! I can’t wait to see the next part

[@emmaborger8474]

basics it's encouraging to learn a little bit more! Well done!

[@jiaqishao4357]

This is a great tutorial. The concise information and clear narration made it very easy to follow and understand. Thanks!

[@curiousity271]

Awesome tutorial!!!!Thanks, am still following along with the rest of your tutorials...

[@andreyse3304]

thanks, ,буду ждать следующего видео))))))

[@simonhilling]

Brilliant first part dude! Great refresher after not having used Flip Fluids for a LONG time :)

[@PixelPlanetStudios]

Thank you! Glad you enjoyed it 🚀

[@sidsriramoffl1785]

So simple and detailed video, it's now going to help to start working wid softsoft!!

[@fcvltee7523]

seriously helped thank you!!

[@ezgisu8679]

This tutorial basicly made sure that my final project will work 😅 thank you so muchhh

[@patriciagabriela6684]

Thanks for the video, very helpful and well explained. Off to make so soft

[@Amogus_robloxian]

Yay thanks for explaining how to use it! Now I can do normal fluid simulations!

[@Big_Llama]

Ahhh this is so helpful, thank you!

[@sekenjonathan0]

The video was very precise.

[@memeabledata]

Great tutorial, this was helpful!

[@saintjames9]

this was such a clean, efficient, comprehensive tutorial. instant sub.

[@PixelPlanetStudios]

Awesome, thank you for the sub! 🚀

[@MysteryFinery]

@@PixelPlanetStudios i made a large barrel with a hole and the water never comes out, what should I do?

[@PixelPlanetStudios]

I literally did a sim like this recently. Depending on your final look, what I did was avoid filling the barrel at all but rather add a flow object in the hole. Does that make sense? This is a setup I’m working on for an advanced flip fluid tutorial.

[@BrianDressel]

This was very helpful, thank you!

[@titusandronicus4826]

Nice video - thanks!

[@onur.nidayi.1344]

Thanks I really enjoyed this. More please :)

[@josefer3d]

Great tutorial thanks

[@noeldc]

Very informative. Subscribed!

[@CharlesMugaviriJr]

You are a good teacher. I subscribed

[@PixelPlanetStudios]

Thanks for subscribing!

[@marmooses]

Thank you. It is so useful.

[@PixelPlanetStudios]

You are welcome!

[@ChrisDjangoConcerts]

really nice video !

[@ayubfauzihafiz5599]

Nice tutorial-5 Bro!

[@AroundTheHouseShow]

Great stuff...very helpful

[@PixelPlanetStudios]

Glad it was helpful! 🚀

[@venkates_vlogs]

Keep on doin what u doin

[@MachineElf1111]

Amazing!!!!! thanks

[@PixelPlanetStudios]

You are welcome! Thanks for watching 🚀

[@ansh.8769]

i love it

[@uselessfarmer]

Love the tutorials and all the explanation, the only downside i would say is the distraction of the music. It's so unnecessary here while we are paying attention here trying to learn.

[@Nortic111]

I bought Flip Fluids last year but, to my shame, I haven't really utilised it yet. So this has been extremely helpful, subscribed!

[@MachineElf1111]

lol , Im 2 years in shame

[@alan112223]

@@MachineElf1111 same here )

[@BryanMartinez_]

saves so much time lmao

[@rosemariemcgowan6388]

Thank you xx

[@hdri3dvideo]

great many thanks

[@PixelPlanetStudios]

You are welcome! 🚀

[@leenkabha1969]

everytNice tutorialng, I really would pay for a webclass

[@Pire-se]

Obrigado!

[@wiktorpietrzak8035]

thx and subscribed

[@PixelPlanetStudios]

Thank you!

[@WallyMahar]

Hope take you advantage their own materials at some point & and the experimental color mix maybe at the end of the series!

[@PixelPlanetStudios]

Thank you! I’ll be sure to include this topic in a later video.

[@ZetaChad_Op]

thanks dear

[@TallyHD]

Good video. You have a new subscriber :)

[@PixelPlanetStudios]

Awesome, thank you!

[@juannicolasreyesrestrepo2070]

Hi man great tutorial! Very well explained! If you dont mind me asking what are your pc specs? since the baking its way solower i want to compare times! Would appreciate it!

[@PixelPlanetStudios]

I am using a M1 Max laptop to record these tutorials. Keep a look at the render time stat in the side window for an accurate sim time because I’ve sped up the sim playback for the of the tutorial. Thanks for watching! 🚀

[@aalomac]

thank

[@BuildEver]

Is your baking speed up? I have Ryzen 5950x, but same simulation as yours takes like 5-6 seconds single frame.

[@alok9337]

Thats how it be

[@Joeherman]

Thank you very much for the great video. I am noticing that the speed of your simulation is much faster than my system. I have a 3090 graphics card and a nice intel chip. Is there a switch you have to enable to get things running as fast as you? Is the graphics card used to calculate the sims? Thank you!

[@PixelPlanetStudios]

Hello and thank you for watching. This is a very common question and firstly I have increased the playback of my sim sections to make this more watchable. In the future I will call this out or leave it real time. As far as your rig. The simulation of this add-on doesn’t utilize the GPU (hopefully it will in the future). So the speed of your sim is based on your cpu. From my experience, both Windows and Mac run quickly with newer hardware. I hope this helps 🚀

[@Joeherman]

@@PixelPlanetStudios Thanks. That makes sense. You might want to mention it so that people don’t think you are on a supercomputer, however speeding up sims is a pretty common thing so I suppose I should have realized it. At least you’ll stop everyone from asking you.

[@maksoz_mtb2924]

which blender version do you use cuz my 3.6 kicks me out when rendering

[@fantastic_xg9056]

goood

[@Murathanaksoz]

does flip fluid plugin export the foam spray as an alembic file ?

[@nosirve9458]

what pc do u have? XD it runs so smoothly

[@alejandrovallejo4330]

I’m curious if you can simulate a planet’s orbit or simulate a ring of water orbiting a planet just with the gravity and speed settings

[@efayetang278]

Love your video! But is there any way that I could possibly remove the watermark from the addon? Or is there any other free addon that I can download?

[@PixelPlanetStudios]

Hi! For this add-on you’ll need to purchase to remove the watermark. But blender has some built in fluid tools as well. 🚀

[@williamminnaar6311]

Hello there - A question please - I am using the base FF materials - the ocean material, but want to make it look much better, like sea water - can I use a textured material on FF fluid - do you have a tutorial on this please? The map tiling is all over the place when I have tried to do this... looks terrible LOL!

[@DamielBE]

could it work with volumes shaders? With some emissive and other being darker? It would make for interesting effects.

[@PixelPlanetStudios]

Yeah that would work too, and even playing with the mesh to volume geo-nodes and bring that to life even more. Great idea!

[@iloveallvideos]

guys this is so frustrating, running blender 3.6 and FLIPS keeps crashing when i attempt to bake the FLIPS sim. this is happening on both of my machines. any suggestions?

[@quanli3552]

May I ask how fast your CPU is? I try to understand the speed problem I have. I have a CPU max speed 4.4 GHz, but very slow. My voxel count is same as yours.

[@PixelPlanetStudios]

This tutorial was completed on a M1 Max CPU, but keep in mind that the cyclone simulation portions were replayed at a faster speed to keep the tutorial pacing quick.

[@Renatamf]

Great tutorial! A little piece of feedback on teaching - you moved a tad fast for a first year learner here and skipped thru vocal propts of what you were doing a lot of times. Other than that, great content, great creative and videos is flawlessly edited. Thank you so much for this video!

[@PixelPlanetStudios]

Thank you for the feedback. I will try to improve moving forward. As a new tutorial creator, I appreciate your notes. Cheers and thank you for watching!

[@maxplusmillion3d]

I'm having an issue with the last part of the tutorial. When I split the sphere in half it creates what Flip Fluids calls a non-manifold object and thus the fluid simulation doesn't run properly. I'm using blender 3.4.1 and Jan release of Flip. So, instead of half a sphere filling with fluid I just just a small amount of fluid. Any guesses?

[@PixelPlanetStudios]

Thanks for watching. Based on the description. I’m guessing the sphere containing the fluid has mesh holes. What you can do is select all the faces of that sphere in edit mode, then select > select all by trait > loose geometry. That will isolate any detached faces. Then I’d select all vertices and use the merge by distance to see if that fixes the issue. Lastly, you could create a new sphere at the origin and reapply the fluid settings. You can also try those steps with the fluid mesh. Let me know if that helps! Good luck 👍🏼

[@user-nz9eq2is8e]

@@PixelPlanetStudios When creating the face on top of the open half sphere it causes a non-manifold face, maybe this is his problem

[@MrVitaDani]

How are you getting the bake to look so clean and fluid (no pun lol). Mine almost looks like a stutter compared to that

[@PixelPlanetStudios]

For the clean look it could be one or two factors. Resolution adds more detail but depending on the settings you have now, making it higher might just have diminishing returns. The other factor is your modifier stack, which I like to use after simulating. So here are things I like to do: 1) Remesh plus shade smooth. Use a low voxel unit until you reach the quality you need 2) Add smooth 3) Smooth again perhaps. I hope this helps and thanks for watching!

[@MTOcreations]

Thanks for this ! Did this take a day to render? Lol

[@PixelPlanetStudios]

I rendered the final animation on a RTX 3090 rig and it took just under 2 hours. My primary workstation would have taken most of a day

[@blenderbeachwavesblend]

From the looks of creating certain simulation of fluid effects, the addon isn't free to use, it has some restriction. I'm just looking for something for 2.92

[@amsrremix2239]

does anyone know if they ever did a tut for vector motion bluer because that actually adds a lot

[@mystery_guy]

if you use Cycles to render, down in the render panel there is a setting for Blur, if you check that box will that do what you want?

[@princepark1013]

I can't figure out how to make an object looking like it's filling with liquid. Starting from the bottom. The liquid won't go past the inflow. But with Blender's fluid simulator, it fills past the inflow...is that possible?

[@pauleakin5595]

fire...getting ahead of myself but can we bring these magical juices into UE5?

[@PixelPlanetStudios]

You can export fluid simulations to UE with alembic files 🚀

[@shyamsundar1092]

7:43 Do this in Quick fluids in blender :) Make a Quick tip video please

[@AgustinCaniglia1992]

how can I delete de water that goes through the domain? I don't want the domain to act as an obstacle.

[@wowersdh1]

bubble and spray particles are not showing up in viewport or rendered image :(

[@Skovidesign]

Is is possible to turn the simulation into an animated mesh with shapekeys or export it out as alembic?

[@PixelPlanetStudios]

Yes, you can export it out as an alembic mesh. Select the fluid surface > Export as Alembic and make sure to select 'Only Selected Objects'. Thanks for watching and I'm sorry for the slow response. Cheers!

[@peterjoslyn1]

The issue I'm having is at a very low simulation setting of 30, it still takes hours to bake anything, and I have a pretty good CPU (AMD Ryzen 7 5800X 8 core with 32 GB of RAM) - is there anyway to speed the process up?

[@PixelPlanetStudios]

Hi! From my experience, the best way to speed things up are to lower the resolution, make sure your domain is as small as it can be, and reducing the geometry of any simulated meshes.

[@Biersoful]

Out of curiosity, why does the sim rely on CPU's and not GPUs?

[@homerhuang7532]

I don't know why my baking is so slow. My computer configuration is cpu 13900K gpu4090, 32G memory DDR5, but it takes a long time to bake. My other computer has a lower configuration, but the baking speed is faster. Do you need to do any settings?

[@PixelPlanetStudios]

This add-on primarily uses the cpu for baking and won’t take advantage of the GPU. So it’s a combination of core count and clock speed. There are other factors to take into account, but it’s outside my knowledge base. If you are comparing your bake time to my system, I’ve increased the playback speed during some of the simulation sections of the video to make the tutorial a shorter duration.

[@stickerey]

I want to "pour" water to glass model, but if I set the glass model to Obstacle with Inverse, and set the Domain to Object Volume, the simulation just wouldn't start, no water is coming out of the fluid

[@YCDesigns]

How do I use imported static objects to use as obstacles? The fluid always passes through an imported object

[@mystery_guy]

you may have to use a slight Solidify modifier to seal the mesh of the object.

[@emmanm5633]

can you create crown splash tutorial pls?

[@PixelPlanetStudios]

You got it! I did some testing and think I can come up with an easy crown splash approach for flip fluids

[@theshadow6273]

Great addon for large-medium scale water simulations. Too bad it has no stick to surface option for small scale viscous fluids, I guess for now we'll have to rely on things like houdini. :(

[@moisesnarro9416]

Do you have to pay only one time for the addon? or its kind of a monthly subscription?

[@PixelPlanetStudios]

It’s a one time price

[@moisesnarro9416]

@@PixelPlanetStudios Oh thx!! Btw awesome tutorials!

[@PixelPlanetStudios]

Thank you 🚀

[@akemi8335]

where can i find the BackLight texture that u used?

[@PixelPlanetStudios]

It’s from Video Copilot www.videocopilot.net/products/element2/#backlight

[@nnelabaptiste5502]

It took almost 24 hours to render this on my I7 intel CPU crazy…

[@PixelPlanetStudios]

If you have access to a gpu, even an older one, you might be surprised by the speed increase. Also, Kaizen Tutorials has a great video on how to speed up your renders.

[@adreanlagnason3512]

You should be my maths teacher

[@pellebonink8116]

Hi, when I try baking the video instead of getting a fluid I get the flip fluid logo. is it because im using the demo?

[@PixelPlanetStudios]

I believe so

[@Prathameshteliprt]

I want to make animation in which water is coming from pipe (very fast speed) and hiting rock and at same time removing dirt from the rock

[@OM33WRLD]

every time I get to the point where its supposed to spin i assign everything same way still doesnt work sigh help ...

[@jasonrobinson834]

When I hit object volume the liquid mesh will not bake anymore is there a fix for this ? i am creating a glass bottle with fluid inside but cant seem to keep it contained inside no matter what i try.

[@PixelPlanetStudios]

I’m 90% positive that the object volume needs to be a closed shape. So a bottle with an opening won’t work but a closed sphere will. Depending on the action you are creating, you could close the top of the bottle in edit mode and re-sim. Let me know if this helps! 🚀

[@jasonrobinson834]

@@PixelPlanetStudios this worked thanks

[@rayotoxi1509]

i dont know what am making wrong on my part my Inflow object is working in the beginning of the time line i tested it around keyframe 0 to 50 But the moment i want to use it where i supposed to keyfram 650 to 680 Its just dosent work no matter what i do increase Resolution from 200 to 230 to 340 to even 500 Still dosent work Only if i move the keyframe back to the beginning i dont understand this why FLIP is Weird

[@PixelPlanetStudios]

One idea: Under the inflow object, you may want you click “Force Re-Export On Next Bake” in the mesh data export section. Perhaps the data isn’t being updated. OR if you haven’t already, be sure to check “export animated data”. Does that help?

[@picterissa]

May I know the specifications of your PC? Because it is impossible to make videos in cycles on mine Only evee On cycles, it will be stored for weeks Even when working in the program, still 1-2 fps

[@PixelPlanetStudios]

This tutorial was created on the M1 Max MacBook Pro with 32gb of ram

[@tmotionman9199]

When are you posting part 2?

[@PixelPlanetStudios]

Part 2 will be released next week 🚀

[@tmotionman9199]

@@PixelPlanetStudios thank you Iam super excited, can't wait.. definitely turning on that notification bell

[@antoonsorg]

Wat cpu do you use for this flipfluid.

[@PixelPlanetStudios]

The flip fluid series was completed on an M1 Max

[@maksoz_mtb2924]

can we export foam alembic for other softwares ?

[@PixelPlanetStudios]

According to the Flip Fluids wiki this is a tricky option. They say, "A common problem with exporting FLIP Fluids whitewater meshes is that some third-party softwares cannot import this data properly. The Blender Alembic exporter does not support exporting particles or instances, so whitewater simulation meshes are structured as vertex-only meshes where each vertex represents the position of a whitewater particle. Some softwares do not recognize vertex-only meshes as valid geometry."

[@cms3d]

Hey, any idea why my baking takes super long times I run a 3090 I have no idea of what is going on

[@PixelPlanetStudios]

Unfortunately Flip Fluids isn’t a GPU accelerated add-on

[@sumucv]

sa ...I don't even have a available device where i can download it

[@ludspastels]

I tried to render a MPEG-4 video, but I only got one frame a long the whole video.

[@ludspastels]

One more thing, I'm not sure if the issue is related, after render a image or video, my simulation is frozen on the layout, I can't play it again.

[@mystery_guy]

I always render to a PNG format into a seperate folder, then use the Video Sequence Editor to generate the video. Always works for me.

[@AdirSousa-zr7lj]

Hey, I'm having a problem... I'm trying to make a bottle pouring beer on a glass, but the fluid is going through the object, but when ''inverse'' is enabled, there is nothing happening on the simulation. I'm using blender 4.1, resolution of 128. When you put a simple object like a cube, it works fine, but with the glass it don't.

[@evolvegamer3975]

I'm new but I think you might need to scale the domain

[@evolvegamer3975]

I'm new but I think you should scale the domain to fit only the glass

[@hoonlee2492]

hey bro particle is not shown in my octane render could help me? :) i can see particle in first frame but other frame is not shown,,,,,,,in render view X(

[@PixelPlanetStudios]

Hey, thanks for the question. I’m looking into this now.

[@PixelPlanetStudios]

I did some tests with particle rendering and octane for Blender. I had to use the 'render image' window to see the final result, and it wouldn't work for me in the live preview rendering inside the viewport. If that doesn't work for you here are some ideas: 1) Make sure the particles are simulated and are appearing in the viewport (non-render view) as points in space. 2) You mentioned they are disappearing after the first frame, so that might be a simulation error with the whitewater settings or fluid movement (hard to say). 3) Increase the particle size in the fluid settings of the bubble, dust, foam or spray items. Let me know if this helps.

[@hoonlee2492]

@@PixelPlanetStudios Thank you. But it didn't work out. Perhaps the render engine needs to use cycles to make accurate simulation possible. Particle simulation doesn't seem to be applied in Octane Render.

[@DaStuntChannel]

You seem to have 3-4x the baking speed that I do.. I'm using an I7 10700 with an RTX 3090..

[@PixelPlanetStudios]

The baking speed that I show is played back at a faster speed to keep the tutorial quick. But right now, FLIP fluids will only use your cpu to bake - fyi. Thanks for watching! 🚀

[@izuchukwuhyginusokoye8218]

Sa bro

[@migloje]

I just keep watching all the fluid simulations but no one, literaly no one shows how to settle down fluids in the simulation, i did alot of simulations but fluid just keeps vobling to infinity, triead alot of setting flip value to 0, diferent viscosities, gravity, high resolution, smoothness etc. but it just don't work, inflow stops but water keeps moving for ages no matter what. Maby you have and idea or tips how to stop fluid to move in the end of simulation.

[@PixelPlanetStudios]

I’m working on a video that addresses this exact thing. Planning to post next week. Stay tuned!

[@migloje]

@@PixelPlanetStudios Basically, every simulation I work on ends up like this, I've made a primitive example video - kzbin.info/www/bejne/Y4DUgX9-rLuZhZY

[@mystery_guy]

@@migloje thanks for sharing your video!

[@Gary_Hun]

Why is it that i must set the world size ludicrous amounts otherwise it is prohibitively or just straight down impossibly slow to simulate? 10x10cm cubes as 20 meters, and like that...

[@PixelPlanetStudios]

This add-on can be very demanding to simulate. Sorry for the slowdowns 😬. Depending on your goal, there may be a better solutions than FlipFluids. Good luck

[@Gary_Hun]

@@PixelPlanetStudios But you didn't get the point, the simulation world must be giant in metrics, otherwise it will just never budge from frame 0. Measured in blender, my scene is half a meter max, but Flip usually translates that to many meters. And the simulation runs well... although i sometimes spot way too big clumps of liquid, or the opposite. So i set the world size to the correct one, and the simulation will be horrifically slow, or will never go from zero.

[@PixelPlanetStudios]

With that small of domain size, most systems should be able to handle higher resolutions. Perhaps you could speed things up by looking at the scene optimization suggestions on flip fluids wiki. If there is one thing this add-on is good for, it’s for smaller scale simulations.

[@XenithXenaku]

How in the hell do you bake so damn quickly?

[@PixelPlanetStudios]

Most of the bake portions of this and other tutorials are played back at faster speeds to keep the tutorials moving. It is a very computational and typically slow process.

[@PrintedB]

@@PixelPlanetStudios was coming to the comments to look for this answer lol I have good hardware and was wondering why my simulations weren't as fast.

[@MercuryRisingFast]

@@PrintedB clear your caches and create new folders.

[@stevecady4845]

I just installed this and i have to say... errors galore. I know there's a drivers thing and my drivers are up to date and studio as they say. But when I try to reset a bake I get all these python errors. I've tried re-installing, used other version of blender and not working. Very disappointed.

[@PixelPlanetStudios]

Hey Steve, I’m sorry to hear about your experience. I myself have been seeing issues with the most recent version on pc vs mac. It may be worth rolling back to the previous stable build. I hope this helps

[@stevecady4845]

@@PixelPlanetStudios did you have success using an older version? Would that work with a newer version of blender?

[@PixelPlanetStudios]

@Steve Cady The release notes for the versions describe possible issues for each version of Blender. I'd recommend also using a previous version of blender that matches the release version you are trying

[@iqbalwijaya9255]

more money then I would recomnd getting Ableton, it's much more powerful and better organized. You don't need to get the suite

[@jaisurya9739]

Too good you can't re-open your projects on trail so if your pc is gonna crash you basically can't edit your anymore.

[@PixelPlanetStudios]

The demo version documentation doesn't list that as a limitation, so I'm sorry that you ran into that issue

[@karthickbaskaran59]

lel

[@blessf26]

Arkplatform