@Jason Sample: Thanks Dude!
@Sinker Cutie: I'm glad you're enjoying the sink, and the new quicksand recipe, but sorry, I'm not into pleasure sinks. I want the fear, the terror, the drama!
I'm kind of a sick fuck that way.
@Aiko: Yes, 8500 frames is quite a lot, and that's only for one shot. Well, two actually. The scene I'm simulation in Real Flow now is actually a combination of shots 4 & 5. There are 6 shots with this girl so far. It took a long time to get the animation in Poser done right. Then bringing the animation into Real Flow, it took several weeks of experimentation to get the right QS recipe, but once I did, it started to come out fantastic!
The fluid system in Blender is very good actually, considering it's free, but yes, it's limited. The only reason I'm not using it is it has the same problem of exchanging data between Poser/Daz and Blender. The way I have to do it is I animate the shot in Poser. Import the poser scene into Lightwave, export from Lightwave using a special plugin that came with Real Flow so it will be in a format that Real Flow can read. After the fluid has been simulated out, I import the fluid geometry into Lightwave for rendering. It's better to render in Lightwave than Poser because Lightwave has many more tools and much more capability than Poser does. I could not have made Disappearing Act just in just Poser.
As to how long the simulation takes per frame, the answer is it depends on how many particles you have, and how much and how complicated the geometry is. And Real Flow has its share of quirks.
One of the problems with Real Flow is it too is kind of buggy at times. The sticky function does not work well in the fluid engine I would like to use, the node system they use does not always work right, forcing you to delete certain nodes and re-adding them to make things work again, and when you actually start the simulation, at first, the simulation goes pretty fast.
The shot I'm simulating now has about 2,874,000 particles. Geometry includes the girl, her hair, the shore line (solid ground), and a layer in the pit that's deep where the girl is but shallow everywhere else. When I start the simulation, it's pretty fast at first but the time per frame inches its way up as the simulation progresses. So, it takes about 1.5 minutes at first, but if I let it go too long, it can take anywhere from 4-5 minutes per frame. To fix that I will stop the simulation, close Real Flow, then start it up again. When I do that, it starts out fast again. I try to restarted the program about every 2 hours or so. This helps speed things along. As I type this, we're up to frame 1358 of 8500. I think we're looking at over 2 weeks to finish. But it will look great when its done. At least I hope so.
Cheers!
Hence the "oh shit!" look on her face and body pose.