Animating loopable ocean waves

[yaschan]

Is there a way to animate ocean waves so that the resulting clip is loopable? It would save me approximately a day in rendering time if I could loop clip without having to render all the frames.
My ocean waves setup is made with bunch of null reference objects / displacement map / bump maps.
If there would be a way to animate the null objects so that they return to same position smoothly without being too obvious, that would do it, wouldn't it?
I would like to hear your advice

[Nangleator]

I've often thought about this. Usually, I'll end up doing a 1/2-second crossfade back to the beginning of my clip and leave it at that, but using nulls as texture references, particularly with more than one null, you ought to be able to do something. Rotate them around to the original location, with each null rotating in a different plane ought to disguise the trick.

[Silkrooster]

Try some of the procedural textures as the displacement map, some will be close to loopable. I would think if you absolutely want to use nulls, that if the positions, etc. match for the first two or three frame and the last two or three frames, you should be able to make it loopable.

[Rove]

hmm, maybe ... look into using a loopable sequence of images?

[Nangleator]

Yeah, that's something I tried. Make an animation that's just a B&W procedural texture moving along, or through a plane. Get 30 seconds of that. Put it in an editor. Chop it in half and put the back half first. Cross fade the seam by a half second or so. Now, that's your repeating texture.

[yaschan]

Curious. I will attempt it!

[Rove]

maybe look into using seamless texture generators like Genetica or Texture Maker if you have any of those to make a seamless imagemap/texturemap sequence.

I would preffer using Genetica because the developer of Texture Maker seems to have dissapeared or something. Maybe aliens abducted him :D.

[erikals]

if you're going for curly waves you might want to try vector displacement...
http://www.newtek.com/forums/showthread.php?t=103733

[dwburman]

A while ago on this forum someone was talking about a way to loop something like a cape or a flag or something using clothFX and mdd files. Like if you wanted to make a walk cycle on a character with loose clothes. The trick was to 'save transformed object' at the point you want the loop and then use that object to make a morph target for the main object.

I never tried the technique, but you might be able to apply clothFX to your ocean and set it so it doesn't actually effect the mesh and use clothFX to scan the vertex movements into an mdd file. Then use the mdd file to drive the animation instead of the nulls and use the morph technique to make it loopable.

Again, I haven't actually tried this, but it might be worth having a go at it... or just let the computer render for the day instead spending a day trying to work out a solution. :)