/home/projects/water.html :: page last updated 02009/02/18
This is a 4 subdivision isosphere with smoothing on, fluid simulation set to a resolution of 150, and animation duration set to 250. Each frame took about twenty minutes to render on a 2.0 ghz intel core duo on Blender 2.4.3 on OS X 10.4.6.
Backdrop in the second movie and the stills is a 20-unit plane, used to show the shadows of the droplets and to provide contrast against the background, as otherwise the sphere is invisible.
And the animation itself, without the contrast plane.
Online Videos by Veoh.com
A couple of months later I went back and re-rendered the scene in yafray, which was an unexpectedly huge pain in the ass, detailed in my series of blog posts.
Online Videos by Veoh.com
(And a 2.55 MiB divx video without the stuttering that veoh added.)
Still frames:
And here's a 1920x1080 version (1.75 MiB .png) of frame 161, suitable for desktops or gazing upon its beauty.
The whole shebang was rendered on a AMD X2 4500+, (dual core 2.5ghz) taking about ten hours for the final render, at 480x270. Source file. (439 KiB .blend)
I was hoping to render the animation at 1080p, but that's going to have to wait for significantly faster computers. (or significantly more money.)