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I'm very new to Blender and I'm trying to make a water vortex like this.(may be not the easyest first project for a newbie)

enter image description here

I watched several tutorial on liquids particle etc but I'm not sure what is the best aproach. What I tried until now:

  1. I made a particle system with a vortex force field. It looks good, but I'm not able to add the right material.

enter image description here

  1. I played around with the fluid physics, the water looks good but if I add a vortex force field it does nothing.

I would be very grateful if somebody could point me in the right direction because I'm definitely stocked.

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Not sure if if you are looking for a physically based animation or a realistic simulation, if not here is a way to fake it.

enter image description here

Create a simple curved mesh object with a single edge sequence shaped as de desired vortex section.

enter image description here

Add both a Screw and a Displace Modifier so it looks as illustrated. Adjust displacement texture as desired, and if necessary add a Subsurf before displacing for higher detail level.

enter image description here

Create a 2D bezier curve object centered on the vortex mesh, roughly the same size, so it flows upwards towards the wider part.

enter image description here

Add two shape keys ($Base$ and $Key 1$) and modify $Key 1$ so the vortex wiggles around. If you wish for the top to remain untilted make sure the top handle stays vertically aligned to the top vertex.

Animate the Value property for $Key 1$ so it goes from $0$ to $1$ and back to $0$ during your animation interval so it loops seamlessly.

enter image description here

Add a Curve modifier to the vortex mesh, pick the previously animated bezier.

Now just animate the rotation of the vortex mesh and tweak the curve shape keys to achieve the desired effect.

enter image description here

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  • $\begingroup$ Nice one! +1. Also with this texture: blender.stackexchange.com/questions/106465/… could be even better. $\endgroup$ – cgslav Jul 30 '18 at 19:23
  • $\begingroup$ Thanks. Yeah that texture looks great. Ideally the vortex mesh would be static and have builtin ridges; and only the displacement would be animated, but couldn't achieve that simply right now. $\endgroup$ – Duarte Farrajota Ramos♦ Jul 30 '18 at 19:33
  • $\begingroup$ Wow, I was expecting a global direction and I got a complete tutorial. That you for that. This will perfectly do for my project, but I wonder if this could be done with a fluid simulation for more realistic animation. $\endgroup$ – Irene Jul 31 '18 at 10:06
  • $\begingroup$ You could probably make it with a fluid simulation alone too, but I'm not sure if Blender physics engine is precise featured enough to do that. What you would loose in direct control you would gain in realism, though my technique certainly has lots of room for improvement $\endgroup$ – Duarte Farrajota Ramos♦ Jul 31 '18 at 12:14

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