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How can I create something like the bubbles in this picture?

enter image description here

They are kissing (not fusing like soap bubbles do) so there should be no overlap.

Is there a way to achieve this with particles?

I envision starting by making a set of large and medium-sized bubbles and then adding a second set of small ones with collisions turned on -that way they should fill the gaps. Is this a good practice or is there a simpler method?

(The large misshapen bubbles are cool but can be ignored for this specific question.)

Thanks in advance.

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    $\begingroup$ Particles don't do collision with each other. You can duplicate a bunch of spheres and use rigid body physics to do collisions. $\endgroup$
    – sambler
    Commented Jun 8, 2014 at 9:04
  • $\begingroup$ if you add one or more hair particle system to a plane -> render -> and select object and for "dupli object" add a sphere on another layer, and set the random size. But that wont give you that "kissing" effect. I don't have much experience with particles, maybe there is more you can do with them. Using a physics simulation would probably give you a better result easier. and soft bodies could be used for large bubbles to get deformation, but that could take time to get right. Hint: using proportional editing with random falloff and scale on individual origins to randomly scale many spheres at o $\endgroup$
    – Nick McDonald
    Commented Jun 11, 2014 at 4:30

1 Answer 1

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This kind of bubble effect can be generated using rigid bodies and force fields. A mix of different size spheres are dropped on a plane and the force field causes them to pull together and space fill.

enter image description here

Procedure (tested on Blender 2.79)

  1. Create the baseline geometry. Add a contained to drop the spheres into, add sphere of different sizes above the container. Set the contained as a passive rigid body. Set the spheres as active rigid bodies.
  2. Add a force field actuator to the center of the container, under the floor. Set the force to a negative value to attract the spheres.
  3. Set the gravity to a high number to pull all of the spheres to the floor and keep them there as they are pulled to the center.
  4. Animate until everything is pulled together.

enter image description here

  1. At this point, the spheres are reasonably packed and approximate the 'kissing spheres' stuck to a plane. Add the shaders and render.

Example Blender file -

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