Pixel Lab Fluid Effects: 3D Animated Rivers

25 Flowing River VFX Elements for Your Render Engine of Choice

Pixel Farm Fluid Effects: 3D Animated Rivers has 25 ultra-realistic river animations. They are Alembic and VDB files which you can load into any render engine/app that supports them such as Blender, Octane, Redshift, Arnold, Houdini, Cycles, and many more.

Incredible Realism

Attention to detail

Every animation has real-world water characteristics.

Flexibility

Beginner to Pro Features

Easy for beginners, but also includes professional options like height and vorticity attributes for wet maps or color variations.

Time Saver

Incredible flexibility

Stop running dozens of simulations and wasting valuable time. These rivers are animated perfectly, complete with a delicious foamy top. Just texture, light and render!

A Layered Approach

Each asset has three components.

1. A rock geometry layer with the river bed and hero rocks. This includes texture tags to easily dial in your textures.
2. A VDB sequence for the frothy, foamy water top. This adds a TON of realism! You can change the density for thicker or thinner foam.
3. A water simulation object. This is a alembic file and you just have to import and put a transparent liquid texture on it.

Import the three layers, make sure they are set to the correct scale, and you are ready to rock and roll! Like a three layer cake you can add these quickly and have an incredible result!

Here are the 25 River Animations included in 3D Animated Rivers

Note: These files are no joke. We’re going for crazy realistic so make sure you have a good hardware/GPU set up and fast internet before you use them. These files are big, pushing 50 gig each. You’ll thank us after you see the realism though!

Embedded Options

Pro Features

If you are a pro user we have some embedded options. Each river bed has a height attribute which can drive shader variations. They can be used to create a static wet map on the edges of the rock (see previews). There is also a vorticity attribute embedded which can drive some color variations in the water mesh. Height and Vorticity attributes are float values and can be accessed by the render within the User Data Node. It would depend on what 3D application you’re using if you can access these. If you’re a pro user, these are available to you, but if you are a beginner I would just ignore them. You’ll find the results incredible without these bonus features!

Note: In order to have high levels of quality these are square models with hard edges. Camera framing needs to be set so you don’t show the end bounds of the river. This asset is perfect for closer up scenes with incredible detail. These would not be great for wide shots showing a large landscape, just be aware! You can hide the edges with DOF, vegetation, bridges, big rocks etc. Be creative!

Textures in Above Render from Redshift Mutating Terrains Pack which pairs perfectly with Rivers.