Bursting Bubbles

I have been looking into how soap bubbles burst. I have discovered this is caused by a phenomenon called "Surface Tension". This is where a liquid surface has resistance against an external force. This is what gives a soap bubble its form. I have also researched into a principle called "LaPlace's Law". This law states that the larger the radius of the vessel (in this case being the soap bubble), the larger the surface tension needs to be to withstand the internal pressure.

I have also tested an idea for simulating the effects of a bubble bursting in Maya. I created a simple polygon sphere primitive, assigned it with a blue Blinn shader, assigned a black and white ramp node into the transparency attribute of the shader and animated the position of the colour sliders of the gradient.

Maya Bubble Burst Test from Mickey Bowen on Vimeo.

I found a video by a Vimeo user by the name of "Scubedio" in which a bubble bursting is simulated using Realflow 2012.

Soap_Bubble from scubedio on Vimeo.

Introduction

Welcome to my Final Major Project blog. Here I will be posting various ideas and updates on the progress of my 3rd year BSc 3D Computer Animation final project at Swansea Metropolitan University. The aim of this project is to develop a plugin (a software tool or feature within an already existing piece of software) to be used in a particular visual effects program, in order to bring extra functionality into it. The visual effects software which this plugin could potentially be used for include:-

• Autodesk Maya - Autodesk.com
• Nuke - The Foundry
• Houdini - Side Effects Software
• Pixar's Renderman
• Realflow - Next Limit