water if life, and we see it everywhere, as rivers, as lakes, as rain , as oceans and everything else, there has always been a away to simulate water in blender as early as blender 2.4 but it has not changed that much, you have a domain cube to contain the simulation, a fluid emitter or inflow and some obstacles and a bake button. its a simple setup but most of the time its not enough, baking fluids can take hours if not days and the final mesh can be millions of polygons which becomes a bottleneck for most computers under 2000$ dollars.

so over the years, artists and developers have come together to make better options for making and rendering water in blender and today lets look at some of those options.

Curve Fluids – Generate 

a fairly new addon, curve fluids bypasses the baking of fluids and opts for a more realtime what you see is what you get process, this addon is geometry nodes based and lets you draw a path for your fluids, it supports collisions with other objects, obviously being realtime and geometrynodes based, its results are no where close to physically accurate simulations, but it provides a quick alternative for someone looking for something simple and quick.

Real Water – Waters Shader

since most renders are just still images, sometimes what you want is just a body of high quality looking water in the background or the foreground of your render, real water addon is a collection of water meshes and shaders, that give you the best looking water with just a drag and drop into your projects. the water have form, caustics and look deep. and if you are creating an animation as long as you don’t espect splashes and ocean waves creating crests and breaking them, the real water addon is enough for that.

Flip Fluids

when blender introduced manta flow, we expected an overhaul of the simulation system and how we do simulations in blender, unfortunately that was not the case, manta flow was still a major upgrade for the blender simulation system and i believe is somewhat underappreciated because of its useability, therefore flip fluids is still the best option for simulating physically accurate fluids in blender, ontop of manta flows strength flip fluids brings the useability that lucks in manta flow.

Cell Fluids

while no tricks are going to beat the quality of simulating fluids using physically accurate solvers like manta flow and flip fluids, alternative realtime fluid solvers like cell fluids will give the next best thing at a fraction of the time and computation power . its not surprising that artists are using cell fluids in there projects to add rivers, lakes, water falls in there renders in realtime for a small cost in the quality which sometimes goes unnoticed or is considered to be part of the art style.

Postshade – Waterfx

another option for rendering realtime water bodies, is postshade, another collection of water shaders that you can add to a plane to look like a like, river or lake , its very simple to use, and you can easily change how your water looks, and how deep it looks.

Real Foam Shader

foam is one of the hardest thing to make in a render, you cant just use a particle system and a texture is not enough to capture the intricate detail in foam.

the the bubbles have to interact with each other and scattered, absorb and reflect light inside the form which is not easy setup as a shader, but this is what the realform shader does exactly. you can use the form for alcohol, soap and everything else you can imagine.

“Shaders Plus”

when light hits glass it creates caustics, this is true for glass and other objects that refract light including water, cycles can render caustics but they are turned off by default because they quadruple the render time of an image, this is a shame because caustics make renders look satisfying, this is why other artists came up with other ways of rendering caustics without adding to the rendertime, shader plus is the best addon i have found for this and infuct it can be used to render caustics in both cycles and eevee in Realtime.

Deltaflow 

if you want realtime and an easyway to direct the flow of water, try delta flow, you can paint the direction you want the water to take, and the shader will update to reflect that, the addon does not stop there it can create wet maps, rain, lava and more.

Water Library Aquatiq – Water Assets

Architects love this water library for its extended library of water assets from fountains, ponds, basins and more, they are all looped and can be easily added into any project with a simple drag and drop. ontop of that you get this ocean waterfront asset that comes with beach waves and water.

Baga Rain Generator

water comes in different forms and rain to me is the most interesting and hardest to make, rain that falls, splashes and makes paddles, that is hard and that what baga rain generator is good at, you can have millions of rain particles and splashes before your computer notices, thanks to how optimized this generator is.

Droplet Generator 2.1

and if you want to show, codesation on objects, then the droplet generator is the best solution. the droplets can be animated and dissolve into others like you would expect in the realworld.

All geometry is being created %100 procedurally, which enables great customization and performance.