Nice job Russ! I like how you performed some investigation of the physics in the second animation. Blender is great fun. You should take some video now and see how the fluid sims compare to reality.
If you didn't already know, the Blender fluid simulator uses the lattice Boltzmann method (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lattice_Boltzmann_methods) and was developed by Nils Thürey as part of a Google-funded "Summer of Code" project.
Thürey has done a lot of great research on fluid animation, with a recent focus on turbulence modeling. His models have been used in some big films like "The Avengers" and "Man of Steel". You can see some of his work on his website: http://www.ntoken.com/pubs.html or his YouTube page: https://www.youtube.com/user/nthuerey/videos
As you can tell, I'm kind of a fan haha. Anyway, I'm a fluid mechanics guy myself, and the animation thing has become a hobby for me. Here's one of my animations of a falling droplet in Blender using Thürey's code:
Hi Ken, I have been thinking about how to make a high speed video of a real splash. The fluid domain size was set to 0.1 meter and the viscosity was set to water in the animation study and I can see that the Worthington jet is not as smooth looking as a real one. I have been looking at a lot of amazing water splash photos on the web and a "trick" some photographers use is to increase the viscosity and lower the surface tension of the water. I going to increase the viscosity in the fluid simulation in Blender to see what happens.
I'm a fan of Nils Thürey also. This animation by him is fantastic:
I've seen a view of Nils videos, but I hadn't seen this surface tension one - thanks for sharing! Very interesting.
Do you know what kind of high-viscosity fluids photographers generally use? I was thinking maybe a glycerine-water mixture, but I'm not sure what the surface tension would be like.
I made a composite video of a real water drop splash. A series of images from different splashes were combined to make this video. Each image was delayed by two milliseconds from the previous one. A total of seventy one images were used. The conditions for the splashes were: Drop height = 63.5 cm, Drop radius = 2.0 mm At this height the impact velocity is 3.5 m/s