I'm trying to do something that seems simple. Filling a pool with water.
My original way to do it worked well: I took the open basin geometry, removed the Shell modifier, capped holes, then applied Scalpel (a Cebas plugin that slices/flattens geometry cleanly) so that it was just below the lip. It gave me a perfect inverse of the original geometry, so that the water was flush with the inside of the basin. However, once I applied a Turbosmooth modifier to the basin geometry and some minor tweaks to the juncture points, it doesn't match the original geometry of the water perfectly, creating ugly seams.
To eliminate the seams, I have tried modifying the old water geometry to make it a bit "thicker" so that it overlaps all inner surfaces of the bowl. For example, I added a shell modifier it and selected the inner surface and deleted it. However, Shell adds artifacts to the top surface (little seams). Uniform rescale also does not work because of the irregularity of the object. I have tried meshsmooth/turbosmoothing the water geometry as well, but that creates other surface irregularities, and alters the geometry in such a way that I can't flatten/fix the surface using Scalpel anymore.
I then tried the original water creation method, selecting the inside of the basin after Turbosmooth had been added, creating a new object with that selection, capping holes/applying Scalpel again. This however created some weird problems with the normals, making the water black despite applying a "Normal" modifier. It appears there's something that Meshsmooth or Turbosmooth does to the basin's topology that makes this old method fail.
I have also tried using ProBoolean to create an inverse water shape, but still had issues with artifacts/normals.
What would you do in this situation? Do people use fluid sim tools for static renders because of these difficulties? Seems like there's gotta be something simple I'm missing.
(I am in 3DS Max 2017. I have uploaded a .max 2015 version of the basin/liquid in question if anyone wants to take a crack at it: https://www.dropbox.com/s/yrjhxhq3rguiosr/BasinFillTestScene.max?dl=0)
Also, here is a link to some of the failed attempts to fill the basin flawlessly: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/iy33hj4cbq1f8gj/AABKgByLxGleZMdNqQ47fmada?dl=0
Would appreciate some insight! Thanks.
