Here you can find a recipe for an animation about the art of pouring a cocktail into a glass, adding ice, a lemon and a nice little umbrella.
It is a realistic approach, so some physics-accurate tools have been used, like Reactor, for rigid body collisions, Real Flow, for liquid dynamics, and Mental Ray, for rendering.
Bellow are two screenshots of the glass and a preview of the animation:
   glass.avi
This is intended to be a step by step tutorial. I have divided it into five sections: the general idea, the modeling, using Reactor physics, using Real Flow and then putting it all together.
The animation was meant to be a sort of countdown for something. There is that table, then the glass falls onto the table, then some numbered blocks of ice start falling into the glass backwards from 10 to 1, then the juice is added and finally a lemon, a straw and a little umbrella are added and the camera zooms in on the umbrella. The idea came from an image I've seen on the Internet. So, the first thing was to find a similar background, which was this one:  
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