how to make the water move and interact?

[Mr Rios]

As i've seen on the lightwave website; the video file of the meteorite going over the sea, that the water moves and interacts. How is done, and does it include enmorphs on the plane of sea, or is it script stuff or expressions? Thanks if anyone can assit me
Thanks.
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Mr Rios

[peder]

I think I saw a brief explanation on that particular effect some time ago. As far as I can remember it was something about using effectors (don't know what it is thoug).

Try searching the old forum.

Peder

[mattclary]

Can you post a link to what you are talking about? If it's the old post I think it is, I think that was discussed.

[Rei]

I *THINK* that the majority of the water is not CG, but just a BG. The trail *in the water* is then quite easy to do as a animated texture. I think the BG water could have been done using an animated displacement map, it looks to only have a single origin too.

Matt going a bit overboard? \/

[mattclary]

LUCKILY, I hang onto this kinda stuff! :) Can't remember the original author to give him credit, but he taught me a lot with this thread:

EDIT: AHHHHH, I see it was Kevman, should have known!!


Smoke trails aren't too difficult - Hold on... let me see if I can create an example on my web site...

Yup, done...

Try this example: (Note: Cut/Paste this URL into the address bar of your browser for it to work)

URL: http://www.geocities.com/kevman.geo/smokey.zip

The scene is extremely simple...

A simple moving FX_emitter, small 'explosion' setting to throw particles outwards and only about 25% of parent motion.

For the hypervoxels, I used "generic" Volumetric settings (no presets used here), added a gradient to colour the smoke in the colour channel based on the distance from the 'emitter' (or the asteroid in this case), boosted the thickness to 100%. I also set the hypertexture to 'expand and dissolve' (Which is very cool for smoke and fire effects with hypervoxels!)

Note that its only an example, so its nowhere near perfect (5 minutes doesn't make for fantastic!)

Take a look and see if it gives you any ideas or helps you with your own settings...




Phil,

You can! See my post at the start of this thread (3rd message down) - it contains a link to an example scene I whacked together in 5 mins (and is the basis for how I did this animation) - All I did for the smoke_water flic was:

* Fiddle around with the particle_emitter settings (in the example scene link in the 3rd post) so the smoke wasn't so 'thick' (In my scene I posted, it was solid! Doh!) and the colours went out to grey/white. I also swapped the gradient input parameter from 'Distance to object' to 'Particle Age' (Which makes more sense really!)

* Flew the particle Emitter over the top of the camera...

* Parented a lensflare to the particle emitter - I activated 'OpenGL Lens Flares' in display options, then I fiddled with the 'fade with distance' settings in the lens flare. The OpenGL preview gave me a good idea how the lensflare would fade out as the meteor passed by... I think nominal distance was 100m, and default flare strength 150%.

* Created a flat plane, added the 'water' default preset surface. I did have this subpatched so I could apply displacements to it, but it didn't look too hot... So I left it flat. Ideally, there should be waves coming off the sides of the meteors wake on the water. I have an extremely simple idea how I can pull that off, But well, maybe another tutorial for another day!

* Added Skytracer - Default settings.

* Added Jolt! to the camera to shake it when the meteor flew over the camera (Started at frame 10, 'Heavy' effect)

* Rendered

What you can do it you want to composite this with live could be to import your live sequence as a background plate in LW.

Sadly HV's don't generate alphas, but you could create 'fake' ones by ramping the textures up to a high level so they looked like a solid colour, then use that...


To adjust the smoke, go to Scene, then select Volumetrics.

You should see the Hypervoxels plugin in the list at the bottom of the window. Just double-click on this to open the options panel for Hypervoxels.

To change the gradient/colour, You'll see the T button hi-lighted on the colour option. Just click this to open the texture editor. Viola - There's that gradient! Once changed/edited, just click on the Use texture button to close the texture editor.

As for the compositing, you could use LW to composit, but everytime you wanted to make a change to the effects, you'd have to re-render the whole particle sequence again. This is fine if you are just doing something for yourself, but if you're doing something for a client... Well, rendertime can kill your budget!

But FYI:

Load your animation sequence in the image editor
Go to the scene/compositing window and set the background as your animation sequence.
Set up lighting and camera to match your background footage as closely as possible.
Add particles
Animate
Do some low-res test renders and see how it looks.

If you want to take the alternative approach, you will still need to set up the camera and lighting to match your background footage. I tend to just take a single frame from the video and use it as the background image to test look/lighting/etc.

Once you're happy - Remove the background and render against a black backdrop.

You could theoretically render them against a blue/green background - Though blue/green screens are great for solids - If your smoke is partially transparent, well, you get the idea!

You can, however, generate a fake alpha sequence in a couple of ways:
(a) Post-process all smoke images in an image program (Photoshop, etc). This would be the fastest way to do this, though you'd have to experiment with levels, etc. Also, any shadows in your clouds may create see-through areas since they are dark.
(b) Re-texture your smoke particles - Just white all over, and no shadows at all (experiment with settings). Then render this out on a black background.

If you make the alpha's and use something like AfterEffects, the extra rendering time for the alpha maps could save you hours of rendering changes in colour, sharpness, etc directly in LightWave.

Alternatively, there's a couple of products for doing 2D/3D particles without rendering in LW. Promethean Composite, and Illusion 2.0

FYI, here's the links:

Promethean - http://www.dam-ent.com
Illusions - http://www.coolfun.com/illusion/index.php


Yup - I thinned out the clouds - Look in the HV settings - Play with the 'thickness' value - I think I set mine to 20%. At 0%, the HV's rendering time crawls slowly, and they have no 'detail', so set it above 0.

Also toy with the shadow setting - I set the shadow strength to 10% I think for that video clip (sorry, don't have it in front of me at the mo')

I also played with the hypertexture until I got the cloudy look I wanted (use VIPER when playing with HV's - You'll work faster that way) - Crumple seems to work best, and I set the effect 'Expand and Dissolve' to 20% amplitude and 50% speed.

Dang, I gotta repeat all this tommorrow at the LWUG! Hope I remember what I just told you! :-)

As for your ps. I have no idea sadly since I don't use either of those app's. I'll assume someone may know if there's a way to convert the motion tracks (or not) for LW.

[VWTornado]

Looks like Illusion has moved to:

http://www.wondertouch.com/

[HowardM]

you could try this - http://vbulletin.newtek.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=1181