Fluid Effects: Floating Object always sinks?

[lostpencil]

Hey Tom, well I got it to work by creating an Ocean Surface Locator and then point constraining the buoy object to the locator. Does that help?

[Kabab]

Create say a sphere or box i usually centre the pivot i dunno if that makes much difference.

Now make your ocean and then select your object and make it float.

No look at the attributes of the locator for your floating object there should be a field called height which has to correspond with the hieght of your object.

So if your object is 5 high and so is the hight setting and you set to bouancy to .5 the object will try to stay 2.5 units out of the water.

Don't touch any of the air dampening fields gravity etc leave them all default..

I hope that helps :bounce:

[E-rock]

i've tried all of those suggestions that were posted and it still didnt work. ive used all the different locator and their options and still nothing. the only one that even comes close to work is the make boats locator, but after about 60 frames it just sinks. i also have tried changing the buoancy and making sure the object height is correct and it still doesn't work

any suggestions-

-eric

also the object i want to float is a detailed buoy but nothing complex.

[lostpencil]

Hey Eric, when you say 'sink'... you mean like it just keeps going down down down... like a particle dragged by gravity? If you want, you can email me the scene and I can try it over here.

[E-rock]

Paul that sounds great, i didn't see your e-mail address anywhere so if i could get that. that would be great
my e-mail is
-freedom756@aol.com

thanks

-eric

[lostpencil]

That would be: paul@lostpencil.com

[lostpencil]

Okay, I think I know what the problem is. When I create the locator (like the Fluid Effects->Ocean->Dynamic Locator) I make sure that the nurbsPlane1 (this is the name of the object in your scene file you sent me) is first selected. I think it needs that to attach the locator properly. Anyway, I sent you the scene file back with the locater connected and the Buoy point constrained to it....

Hope that helps!

[E-rock]

i'm confused on what you sent back to me. the file you sent has the buoy already half under the water, and then it just sinks more into the water. so i'm not sure if thats what you did or if you sent me the wrong file.

thanks for the help though

-eric

[lostpencil]

Ahh... Okay, so now I get what you mean by sinking. The locator gets positioned to the surface of the ocean. When we point constrain the buoy to the locator, it goes underwater because the pivot of the buoy is in the middle of the buoy and not at the base. I sent you another file which has another group node that I use for the constraint. Hope that helps!

[E-rock]

hey paul thats great. how would i go about doing that but using the make boat locator, because that way it will go back and forth along with going up and down. i want to have this look really realistic.

also thank you so much for helping me, this has been extremely nice of you to do.


thanks again

-eric

[lostpencil]

Hey Eric,

Not a problem! Glad to help. I tried it with the boat locator, but it's pretty spastic. It doesn't take into account the size of the buoy, its weight and as a result how much resistance it would have to changing direction. It would probably be best to key frame that motion, but if you want to try it, just create a Boat Locator. Then select the locator, and then the group1 node. Then select Animation->Constrain->Point. That will position it. Then select Animation->Constrain->Orient... that will orient the buy to rotate like the Boat Locator...

Hope that helps!

[Duncan]

The initial height of the boat hull is assumed to be the bounding box of your object. On the locator shape that is created open the extra attributes section. You will see that several attributes controlling buoyancy, boat size, etc have been created. For a tall buoy you should probably set the pivot lower and make the boat height smaller. You can also increase the buoyancy to push the buoy more out of the water. Check out the note section on the locator node for more info.

Duncan

[lostpencil]

Cool! Thanks Duncan. I'll have to check that out.

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