Water VFX Project (Fullsail)

In this project I needed to make water. So my idea was to make water pouring into a glass.  For this project I created a quick cup in Maya and brought it over to Houdini. In Houdini I applied a glass texture to it. Next I added a sphere and this was going to be my emitter.  I also added a ground plane in order to catch whatever water I didn’t get in my cup. I selected my sphere and made my particles emit for object. I also made my cup into a static object, and since my cup was thin in places I uncheck the Use Volume Based Collision Detection. This made it so my water particles would collide with my entire cup. For my water particles, in order to get more particles, I lowered my particle separation to .015 that gave my water more particles. I also believe that adjusted the density, but I don’t remember what the default was. Lastly, I cached out the particle motion. After caching out my particles, I realized that my cup wasn’t filling up and that a lot of my particles seeped though the bottom of my cup. So I just grabbed the bottom of the inside of the cup and brought the up a little high. I also added a light in order to make the water look more realistic. I added a distance light for the main light but added an area light as a key light. I believe most of my work came for my materials, and trying to get my water to look like water. The first thing I did was lower the diffuse intensity to and extremely low .078 in order to clear up the cloudiness of the water. I then brightened up the light blue color of the diffuse in order to give it a very little tint of light blue. I also made sure that the water reflected light and refractions were enable so it could bend the image when looking through the water. Finally I made the render, which took a total of about 10 hours to complete. And that was about it. It didn’t seem like a lot work but it took me a lot longer than it should have. I encounter one problem that took me forever to figure out, but I also don’t know how I fixed it. This problem was with creating the emitter. When creating the emitter, the particles would either be stopped by a bounding box, not collide with my geometry, or didn’t even show up at all. I tried looking for information on how to fix it, but in videos when people applied the emitter it worked properly, and I couldn’t find anyone who had the same problems. Overall I think my project turned out really good. It looks and acts like water. The only problem I couldn’t figure out was why my cup stop filling up after about halfway through the sim.