Emitting fluid from an object

- When we created our Closed_Domain, we got a Water Container and an Emitter. We deleted that Water Container but we left the Emitter. It is still here in the Nodes list, and we can repurpose that. We just need to create a piece of geometry and connect this existing Emitter to that geometry. I'll create a Plane. And once that Plane's been created, I will want to Position it and Scale it back out in this Perspective View here, and grab the Move Tool, and I can Position that Plane roughly, but I've experimented previously and I already know what values I need to get the best result with this particular Plane.

I'll go over to the Nodes Parameters and plug in some values here, the Position, -4 in X, 26 in Y, and -36 in Z, Rotation, -90 degrees in X, and then for the Scale, I want to make it a little bit smaller, X-Scale of a .8, and a Z-Scale of a .3. Getting closer there, and you can see it's there, positioned correctly.

Next, we need to connect the Emitter, so I'll select that Emitter, and then go into its Emitter Parameters and choose the appropriate Object. Click here, and then choose Plane01, and click OK. And the Emitter renders in the Viewport here as a little cross, or a dummy object, and that gets moved and parented to this Plane. I'll also wanted to rename the Plane just for clarity. Double-click it, and I'll rename it PlaneEmitter.

Okay, that's in position now, but if we try to simulate, we won't get anything because the Emitter isn't actually putting out a stream of particles. We'll go to the Emitter Parameters and set Stream to Yes just by clicking on it. For Initial velocity, we want click on that and choose Constant, that means it's going to send particles out from that plane at a constant rate. If we had chosen Inherit, it would have inherited the motion of the plane, and emitted particles accordingly.

Want to choose Constant, we'll need to give it some Speed, otherwise no particles will emit. I'll give it a speed of 3. Okay, with those initial properties set, we can test the simulation. I'll click Simulate down here, and we should see some particles come out, and there they are. But currently, there's no gravity in this scene, so we'll need to add that. I'll hit Escape to stop the simulation, Reset, and then go to the Daemons tab, and create a Gravity Daemon.

And we do want to check in just to make sure that that Gravity has been properly connected to everything. Let's look at the Relationship Editor. You'll probably have it in the lower-right corner of your screen, but I've got it hidden. So I'll go into the Layout Menu and choose Relationship Editor. And I just want to make sure that everything is connected to this Hub here. The Camera doesn't matter, but everything else needs to be somehow connected to that Hub. This manipulator is also not really part of the simulation so it doesn't matter either.

But everything's connected except for the Domain, as you can see here. So we do want to make sure that that is connected, and the way to do that is to click on the outer edge of the Node and then drag to another Node, and now we've made the connection. The domain is connected to the Hub, rockface is connected, and Gravity is connected, and that way the Domain will actually collide with the rockface, and be under the influence of Gravity. Alright, cool. You can close the Relationship Editor, and once again do a test simulation, see what we get.

Okay, so you can see that it's running more or less in realtime. We're getting some water pouring out of that Emitter, and it's colliding with the rockface appropriately. Cool, so I can hit Escape to bomb out of that, and then Reset, and we can move on to the next step of our exercise.