stormy ocean

[Kenshin_X_66]

OK......ive got my stromy ocean scene (off the tutorial on simplylightwave.com) and its looking great, but i want to take it further

i want to put a boat on the water (displacement mapped flat plane) and have it getting tossed about by the waves, any way of doing this so i dont have to hand animate????:confused:

[CoryC]

If you add the same settings you are using to displace the waves to the Y channel, you should be able to get the boat to rise and fall with the waves. You will probably need to tweak it a bit to keep the boat correct. The boat is not going to have the correct angle though.

I haven't tried this but maybe adding a null object a short distance in front of the boat with the same Y channel settings and setting the boat to point at the null would get it to stay angled.

Keyframing wouldn't be too bad if you had to. I would start with one every 100 frames and add more where needed.

[fxnut]

There's not going to be any realistic easy way to simulate the effect of buoyancy using Lightwave's basic tools. You should check out RealWave (http://www.nextlimit.com/productsrealwave00.htm) by NextLimit - it does exactly what you're after. It costs about £370 (GBP).

Regards

Andy

[Kenshin_X_66]

checked out realwave site, the stuff on there looks impressive but i dont want to spend 400 quid to do a 10 second scene

[mattclary]

Any way to do this with motion designer? Seems like it could work in theory.

[jeremyhardin]

eki has a sea generator with the ability to float an object. called Seagen

http://www.kolumbus.fi/erkki.halkka/plugpak/index.html

[fxnut]

I could be wrong on this, but I don't think Eki's Seagen actually 'floats' objects, it just displaces them by the same amount as the water - although that might be all you need.

I think that the RealWave product calculates and applies realistic forces based on the volume of water displaced by the object.

[Kenshin_X_66]

matt: ive been playing around with motion designer all day trying to get something, no luck but thats probably my doing

i kind of assumed i would be able to set the ocean plane as a collision target and drop the boat in, then, as the waves drop, so should the boat right? my MD skills are low, real low, about the only thing i can do is a waving flag

jeremy: Ive been mulling over getting eki's pack for a while, and 70 bucks is a bit closer to my price range!

fxnut: yeah i checked this out and hes got a seperate plug in called seagen boat, which sounds like it could be exactly what i need:cool:

[gjjackson]

I had seen a tutorial on this somewhere. Using a null for the water and the boat parented to the null ( If I remember). Then using an effector with the Motion Designer. I'll have to look around and see if I can find it.


I think I found that link - Boat wake dynamics in MD

http://www.presetcentral.com/presets/results.html?keywords=water

[jeremyhardin]

not entirely automated, but try this.

in Layout:
open your displacement map.
copy all layers
open up graph editor
select your boat object
select it's y channel
click the "modifiers" tab
select textured channel
paste and replace all layers

that will get your up/down motion out of the way.

(edit: realize someone else already said this. sorry.)

[koryhz]

the displacement method is a sound one.
just add noisey channel to the rotation channels in the graph editer and it should look allright.
If you want you could add a null for extra tweaking ability.
I think that should sell it.

there also is a plug in that parents objects to specific points on a specific mesh that may get you pretty far as well.

[munky]

If you can get hold of it Issue 37 of 3d world magazine has exactly the tutorial that you need. It's by Benjamin Smith of stormfront Digital Pictures.

It pretty much uses the displacement method described by jeremy but it goes further by using an array of nulls to calculate the angle of the sea below the boat and toss it about acordingly


Regards


paul

[fxnut]

A problem you'll have if it slaves the boat orientation to the angle of the sea's surface, is that you'll lack any of the proper inertia that you should get due to the time taken for the boat to respond to the buoyancy effect. (I must admit though I haven't seen the tutorial, and it'd be possible to approximate this inertia effect anyway by adding some sort of frame lag on the boats orientation)

Regards

Andy

[munky]

FXNUT

You're absolutley right about the inertia stuff but it does get you bobbing about in the right direction and not left feeling all at sea. See attached moovie. Also with nulls you can independently add animation to the boat to fine tune it with inertia and wave buffeting.

paul

[ckeyes]

This isn't such a great example but I've used the "bob" effect in NatureFX a few times
and found it to be very realistic, but not so cheap.

Carl