Animation: Stormy Ocean

[Yorgo12345]

This is Exceptionally high quality!

it is difficult to find anything to crit!

but perhaps you could take it even further by adding some kind of white water peek breaks (not sure what the actual term is)
although the more I look at it, the less I think you touch it.....really great, Great work!

[l0de]

Wow, it just looks brilliant, the only thing I can find after some minutes of thinking and re-viewing is that it seems a bit to plastic like maybe, I mean by that the tips of the waves, but hey, don't you dare to change it ;)

Reminds me actually to those verry cool The Day After Tomorrow scènes :)

[jussing]

Wow, very nice. I've been playing around with similar experiments, and it's very difficult to get right.



The snow? I'd expect something like rain... and it looks more like an locked-off footage added in composition, and not actual 3D particles in the scene, am I right?
The texture - it doesn't really look "wet"... don't know what to do about that though.
The lightning flash - I think you hold it too long, but then again, Hollywood always does that too. :D
The peaks! (which is where the interesting part starts) - Wow, you made sharp peaks! Congrats! This is where even ILM's stormy water fails. Project after project, we see art department stuff from, say Episode II or Prince of Egypt, where the concept painters make beautiful, sharp waves - but in the final animations, it's always soft sine/cosine waves, that look a lot less realistic. I like your animation a lot - beats anything in Perfect Storm. How did you do this? Gestner waves?
Foam and stuff. It makes things a lot more complicated, but I think you need showers of drops coming off the crests of the big waves, plus "smoke"-ish mist blowing off.
Very nice!

Cheers,
- Jonas

[Seldaek]

I'd love to have some basic explanations (or even a tutorial) about this.. really impressive, maybe it look a bit too much like oil (too shiny ?). One word about the lightnings, they are a bit too long I think, and having a single lightning leave a strange feeling, two is better.

[cg219]

Wow this is great. I love the animation. The water does looks a bit plasticy. Also I think you should add some WHite caps in some of the waves when it splashes down. I would really like to know your method. Keep it up.

[Takara]

sorry, i had no time replying. Thanx a lot for your input.
First the flashes, i always thought they were to short, i wanted to hold make them longer, hm have to think this over...
Yeah the snow... It truelly is footage, i retimed it a bit and made it loopable. The usage of the snow was more or less an "accident" but i guess i liked it because it gave it a colder feeling, but i will try some other stuff too.
Hm, not wet enough, hm difficult, hm....
The peaks, hehehe, i have to admit that i used dreamscape for the geometry of the waves, when you tweek the settings more to the extreme, it gives you some damn cool waves, wich are really hard/impossible to get with ordinary displacements (i think i will use those waves for some kind of dessert/dune pic in the near future).
Yeah, the foam and stuff, i am working on that right now...Damn i love particles...
(btw, i just saw something about oilplatforms and there were a lot of shots where you could see stormwaves and there is really not that much mist from the big waves blowing as one would think. The mist shows when the waves hit something, like tankers or oilplatforms, damn that looks so cool...)
The textures for the sea are also footage i gave a workover. If one is interested i can explain how i made the material for the sea.
Much or most of the final look is created in post.

[blacknoise]

yes... tell us about it ;)

[SilentRage]

I second that.

[cg219]

I Third it.

[terryow]

i think the lightning is a little bit too fast, hmm..maybe u should make it longer..

[jussing]

OK, a compromise suggestion for the flash:

Let the flash last longer, but don't hold it -- strobe it randomly while it lasts.

Real-life flashes are a single frame, but they sometimes spawn a series of flashes, which causes a randomized strobe effect for a very short time.

Hollywood mimicks this in lighting by holding the light for half a second or so, and I always thought that looked silly. :shrug:

Cheers,
- Jonas

[Takara]

thanx jussing, i think i will try the strobe approach for the lightning.
I totally forgot to tell that i am using max, but i am sure some stuff can be translated to other apps as well...
I am still fideling around with the material settings, so i won't give absolut values cause i still don't know what works best. Maybe parts of the material will even change, who knows...(i think i will go for a darker look, maybe i will post some pics of the textures and the compositing soon).
You basically need two materials, wich you can blend with a blend material (as i did) or you render out two sequences and blend them in post. The first material gives you the diffuse (color) part, this material gets a blinn shader (anisotropic will probably work two, maybe even better, but i was lazy when i created the material...), you can give it a high specular level, but i get the feeling that you can leave that material without a specular, seems to make almost no difference in the rendering. The other material is mostly for reflections and hightlights, this material needs a strauss shader, wich you set to a high glossines and a slight metalness (maybe high metalness is even better, depends on the look you want to achive). Then you give both materials the same color and bump and reflection maps (if you want you can leave the diffuse material without a reflection map, it all depends on the look you want).
If you also want a foam material you need a second blend (as i said befor either with the blend material or in post). For the foam material (no particel stuff) i prefered to blend the water with the foam material in post. so i had more control over the look. You need a very simple material that has a diffuse and a bump map (you can also give it a selfillumination map). No speculars or reflection. As a mask for blending i used the foam map that dreamscape creates. Although they tell in their manual that the foam feature of dreamscape can only be used together with their DreamScape:SeaMaterial and Environment Effect, you can still use this feature with your basic max materials. Cause the foam is created as vertex colors that the the dreamscape:sea foam map uses for creating a more complex foam in the dreamscape: seaMaterial, so you only need a vertex color map, the map doesn't look as nice as the dreamscape:sea foam, but now you have much more controll over the look of your final foam material. Either use it as a mask in your blend material or render out a sequence with a totally black background and a blackmaterial witht the vertex color map in the self-illu slot and self-illu set to color.

Although Dreamscape gives you fantastic waves it is a pain in the a++ when you want to use it as a particel emitter... . Don't know why but max gets slow as hell as soon as you choose the dreamscape sea surface for stuff like particel emitting and some other things too... i get the feeling it has something to do with subframesampling...
But as always there is a workaround for that. Simply create a gradient map that you map sideways onto your sea surface, so the highest part of the surface are white the lowest black, render that out from above and use the resulting map as a displacement map :) If you know your 3dsmax it is really easy to match it to your sea surface... Now you can use the displaced surface as your particel emitter :)

[pluMmet]

Very nice. Thanks for the info :)

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