I am trying to render a tube full of bubbles like this one for a liquid cooled pc. I quite frankly don't know where to start, Is there a way to make bubbles using an apperance or is it something I am going to have to model in SW (if so then how)? Im trying to make something that looks like this-
Thanks
Scott,
Rob's idea is good...or you could subtract (mold subtract) a group of sphere's from your tube (liquid). Not sure if this would look realistically like bubbles once rendered or not.
Here's a sample:
You might try creating a bump map from your bubble image and using that with the appearance (surface finish) to help give your bubble appearance some depth.
I had assumed modeling all the bubbles would kill your system which means using PV360 is difficult for this. If you can find a good bubble picture you could create a decal and apply it to the geometry where the bubbles are. In PV360 the decal will show and then you could apply the ripple water material in PV360 and this might help with giving the decal some depth. Might work? Not sure how good it will look?
After letting your computer spend half a day creating the body pattern for that subtract in solidworks, you can turn on 3+ reflection raytracing, and let it spend the next half a month calculating the reflections/refractions through the bubbles!
SW is not a good choice for this.
If a still picture is all you need, use a good hi-res-picture and tweak it in to the rendered picture (without bubbles) with Photoshop.
If you will need to do many renders with the same touch from different angels, or animate you should try RealFlow from Next Limit, it's made for stuff like this, and keeps the job fun too.
http://www.nextlimit.com/
Good luck!