I was watching XKs fantastic presentation called Hyperrealism. Tactility. Emotion. on Youtube.

They showed some Rnd for their Projects and briefly showed the effect of liquid forming into a solid cog.



Link to the effect in the video [youtu.be]

I've seen the effect a number of times but I never found any good information on how to achieve it. The sparse amount of tutorials I could find all used some derivate of the suction force shelf tool. But all these lack the "hardening" effect where the liquid comes to a standstill. It looks more like the liquid is merely confined to a certain space.

I tried Flip Fluids and pushing the particles inside the sfd representation of my desired shape and nulling their velocity as soon as they are inside the sfd. I also tried the same with Pop Fluids but with even less success.

I'm sure there is more to this particular effect and probably it's a blend of numerous methods. But if anyone has created the same kind of effect before and could give me some pointers I'd be much obliged.

Cheers!

Could try initializing your fluid in the shape of the object, sim it breaking apart, re-time the caches in reverse. Might be harder to art direct though but worth a shot.

Looking at the video I think you might be right. The example indeed looks like it is in reverse.
However, what I want to do, is to melt a cog and then recast it into its shape. So I need to find a solution for the transformation from fluid to solid.