Physical simulations are cool, most of us in vfx think so anyway. Once you know the basics of how to set them up in a software package, you could spend hours watching them tick along, doing randomly cool things. What's tough is making simulations do what you need for a shot. It isn't good enough that the results look damn sweet, but they have to look damn sweet while doing what the agency approved in the boards. It's all about control, making the sim do what you need it to. And that's what this course is about. These lessons will go thru a range of common needs in production and teach you how to control the simulations. Along the way we'll also nail most of the common problems that artists run into with RealFlow.

Professor Mark Stasiuk's company, Fusion CI Studios, specializes in creating photo-real fluid visual effects and setting up particle pipelines for companies who wish to do the same.

For this fxphd course, Stasiuk will be using RealFlow, a tool he knows intricately, to work through how to achieve great particle and other dynamic effects. He'll be examining filmed references of fluids in order to learn how to create an accurate and realistic result in the app

class syllabus