When working with a small team, budget, and deadline for weekly animated shorts, CG VFX becomes a very complicated part of the pipeline, because it is very PC performance intensive and one shot can be very complex.
We are a small team that wears multiple hats at Theory, so no only are we doing the VFX, we're also trying to create tools and techniques that make the VFX easier and can be iterated on throughout the rest of the show.
This Liquid Stream effect was one such scenario where we had multiple shots of streaming soda pop and fountains that had to interact with the characters in the scene. Not only did this tool save us a lot of time with easy control and manipulation through Blender's Geometry Nodes system, but it also decreased our render time from running actual fluid sims (because we know Blender isn't the best at that unfortunately), in addition, we were able to quickly turnaround shots and address notes from directors with this tool that we can now use in multiple cases.
Here's a video breakdown showing how the tool works with Blender's Geometry Node setup and modifiers:
And here's the episode where the tool was first featured! Enjoy (: