After sitting down one evening and creating a scene just for my own benefit, I had the idea to create a lava lamp, using the soft-body skills that I have recently acquired. The piece that inspired this wasnt meant to be part of my project, I was just brushing up on my skills and feeling creative, however here’s a short clip of it with each of the different passes.
I was inspired to just create a desk scene; This inspiration has been building over the past few weeks as I have seen more and more pieces on the @polygonrunway Instagram account. I’ve inserted some of my favourite pieces from them below.
When I created my own piece, I struggled to think of things that I could model for the desk and that’s where the idea for a lava lamp came from. In the piece I created initially, I didn’t simulate any actual lava, I just gave the lamp a glow, but I think that simulating lava will be a great demonstration of soft-body physics.
Modeling the lamp was relatively straight forward. I used the deformer tools to get the basic shape, and then to create the top, just did a few extrusions. Then I created my piece of lava inside the lamp (ready to be cloned later on). In doing this I noticed that the lava wasnt touching the edges of the glass; there seemed to be some kind of margin. I have noticed this in previous pieces too, so to combat this problem, I made the ‘glass’ that the lava was colliding with much bigger until it looked like the lava was colliding with the smaller glass, then made the collider glass invisible.
When I created the clones of the lava, I cloned them in an object, which helps distribute them better throughout the lamp. At this point I lowered the number of polygons that the original lava sphere had to try to get it to render a bit faster but realised that that makes the lava look very unrealistic, so compromised by putting it inside a subdivision surface. I also realised that this would work much better with very low gravity in the scene. Obviously inside a lava lamp, the lava moves due to currents in the liquid, created by the heat from the lamp. I would have no clue where to start with this in C4D, if it is even possible, so instead I wanted to create a fake version. This would mean that inside the lamp there would be almost no gravity, and some kind of current to make the lava move. I experimented with wind, however this didnt give me the effect I wanted.
I decided to edit the material for the lava to have a slight glow, as it would in real life. I also decided to change the absorption colour of the glass to the same pink as my lava, which gives off the effect that it is filled with mildly tinted pink liquid. Then I had to add a glow to the glass to make it look like the was a lot of light coming from inside it. Finally, I added an actual light inside the lamp. I like the effect this gives off, some of the lava looks well lit from below just as it would in real life, and the lava at the very bottom doesn’t catch a lot of the light.
I found the interactive render region to be very useful at this stage; It was handy to be able to see realtime updates to the glows without having to make a small change and render it out.
I was still not happy with the movement of my lava, so I changed it to be done with a rotation effector. This gave a much better effect for the lava rising and falling but it was a little tedious to get it to rotate around the point that I wanted. Once this was done I was much happier with the piece and prepared it for rendering. I had to bake the simulation to make sure that nothing out of the ordinary happened in the final render. I also wanted to just bevel the bottom edge of the lamp slightly, so that it could have a better connection with the floor plane, rather than just intersecting it.
Here is the final render. The samples are low so the video is quite noisy, but I really wanted to render out a long portion for this just so that I could really demonstrate the movement of the lava.
I love how the built-in glass material that I customised has refraction, so it distorts the view of the lava just like it would in real life.
I think before I export this for my final piece, I will add a physical bulb into the bottom section, because you can see through the glass that the metal on the bottom is just flat, and that isn’t realistic.
Other than that, I’m really happy with how this turned out!
Finally, a friend suggested that I render the animation out on a dark background instead. I am conflicted on this because as you can see below, it really shows off the lava lamp’s glow, but none of my other pieces are on dark backgrounds, and so, therefore, it would not really fit within my theme. This will have to be something I investigate further at my final export stage.
Jennie Hawkes 