Thread Suggested by Projectkmo.
Post here your ideas and tricks used for this challenge.
Know how to do a matte painting? Post it here.
Know how to do a pull a matte from video? Post it here.
Know how to fog/storm effects your favorite compositor/3d program? Post it!
Know how to do complex camera matching/ lighting set up? Post it!
How do you do realistic waves?
How do you do beach waves?
Looking forward to the posts, but please try to keep it
as application agnostic as possible.
I’ll start on this one 
Those of us who work in Maya know that the Fluid Effects module makes for pretty awesome open ocean and open water scenes, but once we get in the realm of the water interacting with anything it starts getting painful.
Here are a couple of mel scripts that I’ve found that can help:
displaypol
http://www.highend3d.com/maya/downloads/mel_scripts/dynamics/3769.html
Allows you to create a blendshape that is a lowpoly approximation of the ocean/pond shader’s heightfield. This will allow you to do all sorts of nifty stuff: surface flow, generate splashes from collisions, etc.
Hint: to get this working interactively – say in a particle simulation – you need to add the following touch of mel as an expression to the blendshape slider, which is stuck on the first frame of the shape by default:
=frame / (numberofframes)
ex:
=frame / 240
Overburn
http://petershipkov.com/development/overburn/overburn.htm
Allows you to assign fluid effects to particle simulations with pretty amazing results. I’ve just started messing with this, and it’s pretty cool.
Realflow
A seriously powerful liquid, fluid and dynamics simulation engine with integration plugins for every major 3D package.
Best of all, it’s got an unrestricted trial version that you can play with.
Just think… just a couple of years ago, these types of effects would have been utterly terrifying, even to seasoned pros!
Best of luck to all,
–T
I’ll add Master and Commander to the list of reference movies.
As a tip, I’d like to advice everyone to put in a reference boat in their ocean, when working with size and speed of waves, even if you won’t have a boat in the final shot. Otherwise you will waste lots of time changes the waves back and forth, being indecisive about the scale of the scene.
Cheers,
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