The physically not at all accurate ferrofluid
Made using Blender
Focusses on procedural displacement
Ferrofluid is something really fascinating. It is a suspension of tiny magnetic particles in a liquid. So it reacts in presence of a magnetic field. For this animation, it is assumed that a magnet is under the table.
The main thing I wanted to do is to replicate the ferrofluid's attraction towards a magnet. First, I took a cylinder, scaled it down, and filled the top using grid fill for more geometry.
I need spikes. I used a Voronoi texture with zero randomness to get the circles with fall off. Then I made an empty to control where the spikes are to be shown. So I multiplied the circles with a spherical gradient having object coordinates of the empty.
This is plugged into a displacement node and fed to the material displacement. This only works in cycles and in displacement settings of the material, displacement should be chosen as 'displacement only' only or 'displacement and bump'. I chose displacement only. For the surface, I have a principled BSDF for a metallic look. After tweaking the textures for the required shape, this is the result.
This material is completely procedural and can basically be applied to any object.
To animate the motion of the ferrofluid, I applied an object constraint to the empty to follow the path of a bezier circle. I deformed the circle into the shape I want and added keyframes for the offset factor to have a perfect loop.
After a while, it felt lifeless and static. So I added some camera shake and made a few small modifications. This is the result.
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