Sea washing up on a beach.

[luke]

Hi,

I have made sea a few times but never sea washing up on a beach. Does anyone know any tricks, or seen any tutorials that would help? I imagine that I could do a basic job of this fairly quickly (it is for television and is very 'graphic') but I have some time to do it in and I would like to do something a bit more organic and realistic if possible. Any ideas would be appreciated...

[HowardM]

Use Motion Designer to make water with waves...you could use a large rectangle out of cam view to push the waves towards the land...and then roll back off the land.
search here and on Cgtalk for Hard/Soft Bodies using MD..theres plenty of tutorials the past year to learn from!

be forewarned..this isnt an easy task and will take ALOT of tweaking to get it right.

also, using gradients you can change the color of the water as it gets closer to the land...or when it hits the land, you could use PFX to make foam...

...weight maps, morphs....the list goes on and on!
:)

[JulianW]

I really wouldn't use MD for this sort of thing, I'd use a displacement map, it should be an awful lot quicker and give a better result.

For the texture I'd use something sin wave(ish) moving in towards the shore. I'd then put something like crumple on top of that, with a gradual Y movement to add variation over time.

If you want good results it'll probably take a lot of fiddling and tweakage though.

For texturing you probably want some combination of gradiants to try to add foam to the wave crests and where they wash over the beach.

let us know what you try and how you get on,


JW.

[starbase1]

Dave Jerrard's excellent light wave applied book has a chapter on a coastal scene. It;s for an earlier version of LW but is still excellent stuff.

It's rather more along the lines of gentle washes of foam than huge crashing breakers!

Nick

[colkai]

Damn Starbase, ya beat me to it! ;)

I would second this, excellent results, though it depends how close you want to get. It does break down very close up if you're hoping for foam spray etc..

[luke]

Thanks for all these ideas. Plenty to look into! I've got about two weeks until I start this job so I'll have time to do some research. I'll get back to the group when I've done it and let you all know what happened. Ta!

[kevman3d]

I did a beach for a TVC a few months ago...

One way I did it was to model a subpatch 'ocean' and then use a mixture of 'ripples' and a fractal displacement (to break up the evenness of the ripple effect) to generate waves (very subtle small ones) coming up on the beach.

Note that I tweaked the ripples to that they started way off shore, and that they were big enough to run along the width of the beach. I also did plenty of tweaking of the wave length and speed too...

I painted on a weightmap at the beach end of the 'ocean' so I could have the waves fade in as they got close to the sand.

I also did a bit of animated sand texturing to give the impression of 'wetness' as the water pulled away from the sand.

The thing that helps is to control the transparency of the wave 'water' as it gets closer to the beach - It adds a lot to the 'feel' of the water effect.

However, check out the new ripples plugin that has been up on Flay - Its amazing! It doesn't save/load its settings in a scene however (afterall it is a beta only) but I've used it for a few things now... Its like a 'I needed this several times last year!' plugin! :)