Plateau’s Laws

I have recently been looking into some principles of physics known as “Plateau’s Laws”. These laws were introduced by Belgian physicist “Joseph Plateau”. These laws state the following:-

• Three bubbles intersecting must always do so at angles of 120 degrees. These are known as “Plateau Borders”.


• Each Plateau border intersects in fours at one point at approximately 109.47 degrees.


• Soap film surfaces are entirely smooth.


• The mean curvature of the soap film is constant on every part of the film.

I also found a blog on WordPress called “WeWantToLearn.net” which has an article discussing these laws and applying them within a program called “Grasshopper”. This is a graphical algorithm editor integrated inside another 3D program called “Rhino 3D”.

Bubble Research

I have decided to explore further into the bubble generator idea. I have also done some research into various areas related to bubbles, such as how they behave and how they look.
Firstly, I investigated the phenomenon known as "Thin Film Interference". This is where incident light rays reflect off a thin film material and also refracts through it and then reflect out again to form new colours. The example below is specific to a soap bubble:-



This will hopefully help when it comes to shading the bubbles.

I also found a user on YouTube by the name of "ICMStudios" who has developed a similar project to mine. Below are some videos of his tool in action:-

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