Good luck to everyone! :bounce:
I’ll have a go at this, Visual effects isnt my thing but it gives me a chance to push blender and see what I can do with it.
To save bandwidth, I’ll just update the *.mov file, and previous development can been seen via the jpges.
Software used:
Blender 3D
Gimp, for texturing
Previous:
The update:
http://www.solo2design.com/movies/Lindsay_Kerr_FXwar(320x240).mov
Not bad at all! Looks a little gooey, but I like it. Doing it in Blender is an added bonus, there is no plugin for THAT LOL!
your motion is too procedural like. dont use the phase noise too much. mix it with UVW motion.
The surface have to be transparency if you do a close up shot.
try again
Thanks for the replies guys :D, neuromancer1978 I’ll try get rid of that gooey feel(yeah, like you said not using plugin-ins), and loran I’ll work on the motion some more.
Did this today had it modeled/textured(needs more textures)/rigged in about 5 hours, its very basic:
My idea is to have the killer whale break the surface of the ocean and create the VFX for that :curious: . dont know if i can pull this one off with blender though, just have to wait and see.
the first maybe 30 frames are great! it feels like that wave up close is really rolling then it gets sorta gooey like you said but your getting there for sure!
latest update:
Ok so lots of changes 
Firstly, I’ve lost that water shader/material from the previous update, must of saved over the thing and it was such a nice one too, anyway for the life of me I cant recreate it, well not the exact same colours.
I have changed the motion of the ocean, it doesn’t seem to be gooeey any more.
Foam, has been added, lol it looks terrible :argh: .
Started on the surf, how s*** is this stuff to make, particles, particles and more particles, blender is a very sturdy program I havent had many crashes till now (its been crashing every 5 minutes due to the calculations/lack of memory or bug), I am using polygons for my particles however, and I have thousands upon thousands of them, luckily I’m rendering to to tga’s, have only created one break still have to add few more.
Then added that misty rain effect.
and lastly just for a bit of fun animated the whale.
Great progress, the whale looks nice 
I’ve been working on a whale too, mine is a humpback 
Now all I have to to is figure out how to make foam and spray and a splash that looks large scale instead of a drip in a glass 
Hello everyone, this is my first cgforum post, hope I can learn from you guys/gils or maybe I can even help somebody too. I really enjoy all aspects of CG, actually I think Its an addiction, dose it ever stop?
RedSquirrel
You can achieve the whale breaking through the water, just add soft body solver to the water mesh, also add deflection to the whale mesh (soft body damping).
Oh, by the way your entry so far looks fantastic, I love your whale concept.
Thanx Max_Power.
Dlomas thanx for the advice, the oceans movement is actually created with soft bodies applied to a plane with objects passing in and out of it to produce the waves. That’s why my first sea looked gooeey because I had an object pass through the plane near the camera so when the plane contracted it gave that gooeey feel.
Soft bodies will achieve the whale breaking through the surface and the wave it will create but not the splash, I am concidering using the fluid system and some particles to achieve that.
I really love the specular property of your water and the spray is really clever although it still needs a little tweeking.I love the whale model too. Great Idea to have a BIG fish…(I know its actually a mamal) break the surface. Looking forward to seeing it splash back into the water.
Ok so here’s my final piece, lol
http://www.solo2design.com/movies/Lindsay_Kerr_FXwar(320x240).mov
First off this FX War has been a great fun, I hope more people will take part in future.
Everything in this animation was created with freeware.
Creating the ocean waves
The ocean was created by subdividing a plane and applying soft body physics to it. I then created four elongated objects to pass in and out of the plane, each one slightly offset form the other so that they would hit the plane at different times to generate the wave effect.
Creating the surf
Created a number of particle emitters which emits cubes. These emitters where then animated along a path. Then the particles where rendered separately from the scene so that a motion blur could be applied to it.
The whales Splash
Unfortunately the spray effect isn’t as good as in the beginning due to the fact that blender crashed after every second frame was rendered (blender seems to have a problem with object particles and the alpha settings for the particles), before I had used cubes but now I’m using the default halos, no Blender crashing but the quality is lacking (actually it really awful :argh: ).
Modeled a tuna for the whale to chase.
Putting things together
Mostly all the elements where combined in blender, although colour correction and some blurring was done with Jahshaka(limited if you are a Windows user) which only allowed me to render out the animation to bmp files that then had be converted back into mov file with blender.
Sound
Searched the net for free wave sound effects, got a few and combined using Audacity.
I’m now seriously considering Linux, Blender lacks the ability to combine sound with animation files(unless you have that new Linux build that allows you to do so), anyway strangely I’ve found a work around using three programs firstly combine animation and sound using windows movie maker to a wmv file, then using MediaCoder changed it to an avi file, then using Super Fever 1.7(does not read wma files correctly and does not seem to change the dimensions) converted it mov file.
Other than that I would say I have spent about 96hrs(not sure, guessing) on this
Average frame was well under 1min to render.
:D… I’m off to do something else.
Great work!
We go live NEXT Monday, so if you wish to tweak your piece, you have until then.
-R
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