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by henkboyd 3918 days ago
Does your clock require frequent refilling?
1 comments

Hi Henk,

At the moment its working but its not perfect. The biggest challenge i had was to make this really look like fluid and kill the ferrofluid spikes. I simply wanted to animate the fluid not make it obvious that its a ferrofluid. So i had to thin the ferrofluid with all kinds of different things, some work better some work worse, still testing.

That's true! It's not viscous at all, which makes it all the more mesmerizing.
I was wondering about the spikes. What did you do that worked / didn't work to fix that?

What is the 'thickness'? I'm guessing only several millimeters??

actually this was the hardest part, how to make numbers look thick and REAL, and connected. Here is a GIF that shows this nicely:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/066c8502j2zwlwo/rheiani.gif?dl=0

Thats the reason why i had to work with ferrofluid and change its structure and composition, i wanted to have thicker numbers. Whole screen is 10mm thick inside, and numbers sometimes go up to 8mm of thickness. They are especially nice from the angle because the seem like they float and not simply stuck to the wall. I will make better photos definitely.

You've done that quite well. I'm surprised its that thick, but it looks like it give the numbers an awesome rounded look.

Really adds to the organic look and feel.

Well done!

Yeah, when there is no number it turns to big blobs of liquid that actually touch walls of the screen on both sides, so i guess its bigger than 10mm in that case