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On The Shelf
3D modeling
Liquid simulation
Fracture simulation
Texturing
Rendering
Animation
Editing
Color Grading
Overview
This short 3D animation was inspired by the artwork of Michael Craig-Martin “On The Shelf” (1970). At first I planned to recreate the still version of his work which is a picture of a tilted shelf with 15 milk bottles on it filled with water. But my curisoty quickly led me to wondering how this would look animated. It was quite a challenge as each bottle needed its own level of liquid and its own liquid simulation. The liquid simulations then needed to interact with each single bottle as rigid bodies. Finally, the bottles needed to fall down and break on the floor, fracture and letting the water splash out of the broken bottles. Liquid simulation was done with PhoenixFD. The rigid bodies and fracture simulations where made with tyFlow. The room called “Soho Showroom” was modelled by BBB3viz and textured by Jonathan Nicholson. The entire animation was rendered with FStorm. Special thanks to Zdravko Pavlov for his precious help with PhoenixFD.
Music by Yehezkel Raz “Close from Above”.
3dsMax
PhoenixFD
tyFlow
Pulze.io
FStorm
DaVinci Resolve
Making Of
First I modeled the milk bottle using the picture from as a reference. The most difficul part of the animation was to fill each one of the 15 bottles with a different amount of liquid so that once the shelf and all the bottles have tilted, the line created by the amount of liquid in each bottle is perfectly horizontal. It took a lot of trial and error and testing many different ways to make it work. It also took hours (and nights) of computing the liquid simulations. The second tricky part was to have each liquid simulation stay inside each bottle that are rigid bodies as they interact with the shelf but also with one another. Once the shelf tilts, the bottles also tilt and then slightly slide against one another. Then when the rack breaks (also rigid body), the shelf falls to the floor, leading to all the bottles also falling to the floor. When the bottles hit the floor they break up which also lets the liquid splash out of the broken bottles. Finally both the pieces of broken bottles and the liquid interact with the ground floor.
