Stream test + explanation

I had an idea earlier today, to see if I could easily deform alembics... turns out it's entirely possible. Here's my first test with a lattice and shrink wrapping:

Here's what I did- I baked a stream of fluids for 250 frames in a narrow, tall domain:

Now, the advantage of baking a straight line of liquid is the domain can be very small, which means higher detail and fluid shape can be realized much more quickly and efficiently. Using only 14,300, we can get a pretty nice result.

Here's an example of the same density domain, but for a curve as extreme as seen in the header gif:

That is a lot more fluid voxels to simulate! The cell count is 141,100 here. To really get a nice, curved shape with good detail, you might want a more dense grid. I've double the grid volume here (previous it was 100, now it's 200):

It's in the millions now... which means it would be quite slow to simulate this.

Here's my initial test on a lattice that deforms the baked fluid stream alembic:

Also, the alembic has a smooth modifier on it. So, it appears smoother- this can be done on any fluid sim to kind of shave away some splotchy/blockiness resulting from a coarse grid.

Finally, I figured out how deform the lattice using an armature! Check this out:

In order to use an armature to deform a lattice, you must use bone envelopes. There is 1 bone per point on the lattice, as well as a bone that 4 points are parented to. The big bone controls how narrow the stream is by scaling the root bone of the stream chain.

Each bone by a point deforms, so you can see a white aura around it. This is it's envelope. As long as the point is within that area, the point will deform with the bone.

Here's what the armature looks like animated. The bend is a simple IK bone on the stream bone chain. So you can move it around and with scaling, make it seem like someone is a taking a mad leak. The result is... quite nice, if you ask me! Considering how a huge, dense fluid domain wasn't necessary.

So if anyone wants to see like... a very short, very simple [p]1ss animation, let me know.