I created a quick prototype of a realtime liquid simulation for a project over at Chiat a couple weeks ago. The result might not be very realistic, a little cartoony you might say, but it’s definitely fun to play with (any program that features real-time physics just fascinates me). I made a quick demo to show you how it’s done.

Click to open SWF

I quickly looked at some reviews to make my choice on the physics engine i would use and APE seemed to be the simplest one. It was pretty simple indeed as i was able to put up my original demo in a single day. It was a little tricky to create the physics bottle that would hold the particles. The easiest way i found was to put movieclips on stage in the shape of the bottle and loop through each pieces and create a corresponding APE RectangleParticule. The tricky part is that when you rotate a movieclip in flash, the height and width of the clip changes, so i had to nest a movieclip within to be able to read the correct height and width of the particle.

Download the source