Like with the previous assessment, to begin with I just started playing around with the different things I could do after watching the lectures. I placed in some basic static platforms and RBD spheres to interact with, and had the idea for these spheres to funnel down through a tube and onto a sloped platform, with some more static walls for them to collide into as they slid down.

I modeled a simple pipe in maya, exported it in and turned it into a static object, but ran into a problem when the spheres wouldn't actually go through it. After some research, I fixed this by changing the geometry representation to 'concave' in the DOP network node. 

After this I put in a particle emitter and messed around with different pop nodes. Eventually I had a sort of water-fall effect of particles which the balls would go through,  and found I could make a nice looking gradient of colours with the pop colour node. I realised later that it didn't come out as well in the final render as it should have and you can't really tell how the particles burst out when the spheres pass through, but by then I was too far into the rendering process and didn't want to restart and risk not having enough time for it.

Next I started figuring out fluid simulation and made a fliptank which the spheres would drop into to create some interesting splashes, and adjusted the nodes until I was happy with it. This part was a little more annoying because it took much longer to cook the simulation even with everything else turned off. 

For the final part of my animation, I used the rbd material fracture to make an object fall and shatter. I found a guide online on how to give the outside and inside different materials, and this simulation was probably my favourite part just because of how interesting it looks especially with the different materials. 

After I had finished each simulation up I cached all of them, which took longer than I expected (mostly due to the water taking 4 hours), but when I started trying to get everything ready to render I kept running into issues where the render tests would come out weird and not working as expected (eg. water just a grey block, everything white and materials not appearing properly). Eventually I just gave up trying to fix it and instead put all the cached simulations and objects into a new scene, which immediately fixed my rendering issues. 

Once I got everything to look the way I wanted in the render test and fixed up all the materials/finishing touches like adding the background to the camera, I finished setting up the camera animation and rendered it all out.