Recently I found this plugin for Maya. It seems to be quite easy to use and delivers impressive effects imho. Maybe not as accurate as realflow, but this one is free.
Is there something similar for 3ds max? After someone converted the Houdini ocean stuff for Max, I’m hoping there are some talented programmers who are able to do the same thing here?!
Deflectors and a particle system?
That is all that looks like to me, it doesn’t do any kind of surface deformation.
Which, now that I mention it, you could actually get a proper particle system setup to do.
Yes, that’s what I already did, but as soon as you’re trying to use the animated surface as deflector for the falling particles it takes years for pflow to calculate. Btw it seems that the plugin creates foammaps for the object and for the particles as well.
I would make you an example but I am not in front of max ATM
The trick is to use a low res copy of your ocean mesh as your deflector. You can easily get away with enough mesh match the general shape of the surface, not all the secondary and tertiary ripples. This is obviously pretty shot dependent but you can adjust that interaction.
I learned another trick from Brandon Davis and adopted it for particle collisions, create a piece of geometry that matches the cameras frustum. There is actually a real cool script by Matrin Breidt called viewFrustum at scriptspot that does this for you. Use this geometry to delete all of the collision mesh that is outside the view of the camera, this speeds up collision calculation significantly, especially when use large complex meshes. There is no reason for pslow to try and calculate a collision surface that is nowhere near where particles are colliding.
Edit:
About the foam maps, hmmm, you could probably shape mark the surface.
I guess the point I’m getting at is you can do this fairly easily in max and that there is no plugin, that I know of at least, that does this, apart from naiad or realflow.
If I get a little time later I will build an example.
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