Your client has requested you to accurately animate a boat on water during a storm. He wants to see splashes and the boat rocking to and fro accurately following the waves. The skies are stormy and he wants a torrent of rain to be falling. Lightning in the distance. Its twilight and visability is limited. Visable light glows from the boat’s cabin. You don’t have psunami.
What would your approach be?
>You don’t have psunami.
>What would your approach be?
Go to the Northern Lights website and buy it. 
GM
You’re broke and need this job to pay your rent. Or how about, the internet is down and you can’t get through to Blair. I’ve got a dozen more.
You pray to these guys!
http://www.flowlines.info/gallery.html
(tell them you want to integrate it into EIAS)
view the one on the right
actually I just came across them and was blown away!
it’s not like that will help you but it is amazing none the less
Jay
I cant see the problem, since Northern Lights plugs are relativly inexpensive and are doing a good job especially for that task, so if you’ll work hard render fast and all is well done, you’ll pay the plugs and your rent with that job and save the rest.
Steffen
Sigh… :banghead: I’m trying to accomplish something here people… lol…
You know…education…
Be nice
ok I’ll bite…
I think that I would try I2M with an animated image file for the water suface.
and parent the boat to a uberplane with inherit deforms on parent that group to the I2M plug and have it deform everything that is parented to it. Similar to this technique
http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?t=314077
Do you have AE to work with?
lightning from there
splashes with pp and blobby also parented to the deformed plane (actually parent them to the boat and inherit position turned on.
am I close?
did I win?
Jay
hehe:applause:
how about RealFlow?
If that is not the answer, than I will think on some other else…
Loon
Haha!
Fine, I’ll have a go. No 3rd party anything in mine…
The boat rocking on the water (the hard part!)
Deform the high res water plane with runwave, use XP2 to ‘stick’ the boat to the water while moving it forwards (ive done this before, but not on a deformed surface… I hope it will work). The problem here will be getting the angle of the boat on the waves right, there are a number of ways you could fake it by simply keyframing but that doesn’t seem fun, someone help me on that one – I don’t know the math to do it in XP…
Rain with PPB, rendered out on a separate pass with motion blur. The splashes could be done with PPB but they might look a little skeletal, maybe if you attach enough emitters to the side of the boat with varied settings (no EI to test!)… Blobby would be too slow, could use a nasty ugly transparency map on a rotating sphere… forget i said that. How about a smoker? Now were talking, use one of them for spray, a really sparse fractal pattern would probably look REALLY cool for that effect…
I would use a luminescent lantern for the cabin light, that way GI would see it as a light source and bounce the light around. I might put a tube light in the cabin, with a dropoff just round the cabin -and make it low intensity- these things create a really cool glow effect.
I would add the boat to a couple of nulls to add some repeating movement noise using the FCE.
The distant clouds would be on a sky dome, or, if i had time, i might use smokers, but they look a bit rough and ready for clouds.
Lightning? Are you kidding!?
I’d do it in post! Maybe create a number of lightning pictures in Photoshop with alpha and flash them up occasionally, you could randomise it with XP2 (map them to the sky dome on top of the cloud map (in the luminance channel, have XP2 randomise the rotations of the maps so that the lightning doesn’t strike the same place twice!).
So, basically, use XP
Right, now there’s something for people to take aim at… go on! Improve on it!
Ian
opps didn’t read this, I’ll think of the hard way, so I’m broke, i don’t even have any 3rd party plug-in…
let me think first…
Loon
Ok… maybe I need to explain this a little better. We all run into situations at work every day. Being a previs artist, I have to think on my feet constantly to make up sequences and scenarios for film. In many cases, I don’t have everything I need or a point and click solution. In this scenario, I’m looking for your problem solving approach to creating this scene. How would you do water without psunami. What about rain? Lightning? The boat traveling along the surface of the water and giant waves? Skies? Twilight? What kind of lighting would you use? How would you do splashes.
I’ll tell you what. You can use any other plugin or shader other than psunami… the obvious choice.
Curse you Brian!
After all the trouble I went through to avoid saying “Use Realflow”.
Ian
I have a project file without the boat…yeah, no much interesting until I say that…It features foam in the waves. As now I am swamped in the middle of a move, is hard for me to post it, but I will post the movie ASAP. A quite convincing effect for a stormy ocean, and made with the SimpleWave shader plus the FractalFoam shader over a simple UberShape. No match for Psunami waves, of course, but still really cool.
Being a brand spanking new EI user this type of stuff really helps. You have to be able to accomplish this in EI by default right? I mean I know how to do this in Maya either by using the fluids stuff or by using motion paths, things like that.
Thanks for posting this stuff because EI just showed up on my doorstep and tonight, I get to dig in for the first time.
Yeah! You’ll have to tell us about your new experiences!
Can EIAS accomplish this scene, yes, without a doubt. But I’ve mentioned before, EIAS with its Ala carte approach basically states, yeah… that’s easy, just buy this plug in. So you do, you charge your client for it, and now its in your inventory. Next time you use it, it makes you money. Most of the plugin solutions are quite sophisticated and offer lots of options.
But this scene can be accomplished with little to no outside support, save the particle systems. EIAS includes a really crude particle system that really needs to be replaced. Coming from Maya, you’re gonna look at Power Particles basic and chuckle. Its childish by comparison. Dante by Northern Lights, is really the only solution for particles in EI in my opinion. It offers all kinds of particle options including collision objects, force fields, etc etc etc. Power Particles Pro version could be nicer because it has a handier interface, but it hasn’t gone through a major overhaul in a while.
Lets start with water generation. The cheapest solution is to pick up Image2Mesh. This is a free plugin that is very powerful and does a great job.
Ok… who wants to take it from here…what other ways are there to create an ocean like water plane without Real Flow or Psunami?
Does EI have animated deformers like say a spline deformer? By the way, I can’t wait to get home and play with this… Is it 6:30 yet? =)
Yes,
EIAS has a lot of animated deformers and good ones at that. Does it have a spline deformer? Yes. There are also a couple of plugins that exist that do similiar functions as Maya’s flow deformer on motion paths.
Contortionist by Northern Lights and Flexpath by Konkeptione.
This is Runwave, the boat has a constraint with the mesh set to surface normal.
Rain and lightning in Photoshop. Animation tomorrow.
How about the lightning? Of course we can use Northern Light’s Zeus, but in this particular situation, lighting is in the distance, so why trouble yourself with 3D lightning. Animated .img sequences or qt movies with alphas can supply a quick card solution. Add a little glow and your set.
The ocean… well, I’ve been able to make great oceans and swells with animated grey scale maps and Image2Mesh. Once the geometry is made and animating, I’d create my boat and parent it to a hierarchy of nulls. With the parent (top) null I would then constraint it to the surface of the water with a geometry constraint. This would allow you the swelling action of the water to move the boat as you animate the null across the surface. Seperate nulls could then be used to provide manual pitch, yaw and roll and sink the boat partially into the water. (Which you’re going to want control of anyway).
Sky? Konkeptoine offers a great conception series of sky shaders that could provide any number of looks or simply create a uber shape dome and texture map it with a stormy sky texture. If you want 3D clouds, there’s all kinds of solutions for that. Kmyst, Psyclone, Mondo Clouds, Dante…