Simple waterfall with Max or Fume FX?

[Piflik]

Since waterfalls are more like mist than liquid, I'd advice against Realflow. You can do a quite nice Waterfall with PFlow alone and if you throw in FumeFX, you can create a really convincing one ;).

If you need a tutorial, go get Pete Drapers book 'Deconstructing the Elements third Ed.'. He has a quite nice waterfall tutorial. (The tutorial is actually on the second edition, but you'll get access to a online version of it, when you buy the third; you'll get two great books for the price of one ;))

[Dreamie]

Another method is just to use an offset animation for a noise\turbulence procedural texture on a waterfall shaped like geometry. On top of it you add a mist from the sides and at the lower impact area. (mist with particles with either fumefx/sprites/etc.. )

[sundialsvc4]

First, figure out just how detailed the shot needs to be, in order to carry the effect.

Then, consider what the finished effect needs to look like.

Finally, figure out how you can "fake it." :)

For instance... a volume made up of several different (distinct and separate) surfaces, all more-or-less translucent (alpha less than 1.0), will create the appearance of the necessary volume. A likewise translucent animated texture on each of these layers, at different offsets and speeds, will create a good chaotic effect. If you need to, a few particle-emitters which are also being animated down the path of the waterfall will give you splashes of water.

If you plan to cut to a close-up at the bottom of the falls, then your needs for that shot will be quite different from those for a medium-shot of the same falls. That's the only time when you might have to think about things like "splashing off of rocks." But that's an entirely different camera-setup, an entirely different shot.

In any case, then, you want to start breaking the shot down into pieces.
First, a plate of the surrounding forest ... of "wherever this waterfall is." Foreground and background plates. Shoot several of these animated-texture layers. (Or cheat even more and shoot just one, planning to composite it with itself at different offsets in time and in space.) One or more layers of the particle-driven mist, to be used sparingly.
Now, to the compositor, your trusty time-saving friend! Start stacking-up each one of these layers in a node network. Don't forget knobs that will let you control alpha, color negative timing and so-on. All of the various layers come together front-to-back, animating at different speeds, maybe with a "blur" node on some of them. You get the idea. You tweak it, and you "mix it down" just like they do in an audio recording studio until you get it just right. (Once you have rendered all of the pieces, you won't be rendering or re-rendering anything again.) The stuff in front is brighter and sharper, with the occasional color as though from refraction; the stuff in the back is slower, blurrier, darker, more monochrome.

Work it until you've got the shot where it will sell, and then stop. You've got fifty or sixty more shots to do, after all.

And... if that workflow is entirely different from the one you'd been thinking of, then that, of course, was precisely my point. :thumbsup:

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