Problem of the day: Storm

#21

I’ve never used Runwave… I’m going to have to look into this. :slight_smile: Great job Richard. Thanks!

#22

Actually, you have some good ideas. Displacement with I2M will also work. PPbasic with Mr. Blobby is another good solution for splashes.

#23

If the water is a highpoly mesh which I think it might have to be to animate convincing waves. I would make a grey scale animated seamless wake in Photoshop and if I am poor I’ll use paint shop pro or if I’m skint I’ll use GIMP (I use this anyway) maybe I could use a open source compositing program for some of it too. I would like that to the boat. There we have a wake for the boat. I2M does seem like the likely choice for the waves but I think that an animated Photoshop waves could work too. For that. Same for the rain droplets in the sea. Layer them up and that should be that. Don’t know much about getting the boat to follow the wave surface of the waves.

Is it possible to have xp place particles on the crest of waves? I’ll explain a bit more say when wave hits X high set ppp to on. Or some thing a little more complex than that.

#24

I agree, I still don’t understand why they didn’t update the Particles Plug-In that used to come with EIAS 2.x? at least to run with v3,4,5,6 - jeez it’s been that long?
The interface wasn’t very exciting or friendly, but you could at least do some really cool FX with it.
I recall someone did some really nice Fireworks FX with it.
It’s too bad it couldn’t be resurrected and or even expanded upon.

#25

Caveat: This comment is intended for people using EI to make a living.

It wouldn’t be like me to whine about this thread killing potential sales. Nevertheless, I’ll throw an important point to consider here. How much are you getting paid? Is it by the project or hourly? In my experience, you get paid by the project not by the hour. So what’s your time really worth in dollars? If you spend several hours that end up stretching into days, you haven’t saved yourself anything by not buying Psunami (or any other tool for that matter). More often than not, not spending some money up front ends up costing more than if you did.

Case in point: a small VFX house that many of you may know does a whole lot of work in EI. They boys in the trenches have told me many times that one or more of my plugins would have saved them hours, days, sometimes weeks of work yet convincing their boss to ante up is a fruitless effort. The boys end up busting their butts to get something done and the hours wasted could have easily been devoted to new projects that would generate more revenue.

After all, why would you try to build a house with hand tools when you can build several in the same amount of time using power tools?

#26

I recently tried to explain to my uncle why I needed to buy Dante for a work project involving a bunch o coins, and he was like why can’t you do it without spending $? and I said something similar…

I can cut my lawn with a pair of scissors, but I choose not to…

:rolleyes:

#27

Oh I completely agree with you Blair. If you can afford the customized plugin solution, by all means, get it. Most VFX houses can and do. It saves them money and it will give you beautiful results. But a lot of new 3D folks and hobbyists can’t spare the change. These kinds of threads are not to convince users not to buy plugins, but rather, for education. People need to learn the capabilities of their software first, then enhance it with all the goodies which you offer.

Doing animation and film for the studios has taught me, always find the quickest and simplest solution first. Work up from there…even if its only a mental exercise. By knowing what you can do with the tools you’re initially given, will only clarify what you can do once you get the power tools.

#28

I’ve been checking out the Northern Lights plugins and I can see that there are a few that I’ll most likely need if I can get ramped up in time to use EI on my next project. I definitely don’t intend on spinning my wheels trying to accomplish something that is trivial in a $299 plugin. That’s pretty darn cheap and is very easy to have a client absorb most/all of the cost.

I like threads like these because being so new, I’m going to be challenged to identify what is not possible because I’m not used to the EI workflow and what isn’t possible because EI doesn’t have a certain feature; however, there is a plugin that fits the need. Then add on which plugin handles that feature and you have a bit of a learning curve. Hopefully this forum will help in those situations.

#29

You’ll find that the EI community is pretty cooperative. Many years of having to fend for ourselves plus the lack of a huge community like Maya’s has caused us to be pretty helpful towards “our own”. Plus you’re pretty much latching on to the whole plugin ala carte mentality pretty quickly. Get it when you need it. Why pay for something you’re not going to use?

EIAS has a lot of internal capability. Some I have yet to even explore. There are things it simply does easier and better than Maya and in other areas it falls on its face without 3rd party plugin support.

#30

Brian as much as i understand and appreciate your intention - even if I am not the EIAS master to make great contribution to it - i think it is likewise reasonable to talk about what you can do with thoses great plugs, you can have for EIAS, which indeed are often much less expensive than comparable plugs for other 3D-Applications. So don’t think newbies and hobbyist are not intrested in the EIAS-plugs at all.

I think they do not only contribute to the power of EIAS, but they also have to be learned, just because they are often as demanding as complex in their variability. Just think not only about Dante or Psunami but to about plugs like Blaster, Fiberforge or the (hopeful upcomming) “Rodeo”, or shaders like NX, or the AG-Shaders for instance - you know there a quite a lot more to mention. (Not to forget the now implemented XPressionist which is allone worth a whole bunch of how-to-threads).

So even if i do understand the purpose of this thread quite well, I think it is also reasonable to talk about efficient “how to”'s of the complex and powerful plugs for EIAS too.
Steffen

#31

I got a couple of animations going this morning using deforms but XP was giving me some slightly unexpected results (got it going over the ocean but it was quite rough and jumpy).

Using a geom constraint wasn’t much smoother… The mesh is really tight too…

I’ll give it a go with displacement instead of deforms.
Ian

#32

Oh no worries Steffen. I don’t take any offense to what you or Blair are saying. Quite the contrary. I have lots of plans for this forum and highlighting plugins/shaders and their usage is one of them. Thing is, the biggest thing I have heard time after time from EI users is, “Where are the tutorials?” How do I do something? My philosophy is, as I stated earlier, understand what you have first, then upgrade to the powertools later when needed. Think of it as the McGuyver method. If you don’t know who McGuyver is, he was a secret agent type fellow who could build crazy contraptions and weapons out of bobbie pins and rubber bands. In this sharing tutorial, we’ve built our scene without the use of fancy tools. As a newcomer, I know that I would kinda want to know some of that, especially if some how I found myself without those special tools.

Maybe I’m finally starting to show my age in this industry and I feel like students of 3D need to understand certain foundational concepts of how something works before moving on. (Oh my God, I’m becoming my old collage professor who was still teaching rubylift in commercial art class)

So stick with me my friend. We’re only getting started here. We want this forum to appeal to all levels of users, including those who do or do not have a particular plugin to work with. If per chance you’re an expert on a particular plugin, I’d LOVE it if you would post something for all to see. It would certainly be really appreciated. :slight_smile: Or perhaps there is a particular plugin that you would like to discuss?

#33

Not concerntrate to the sea texture, more on the animation

I use 4 null constrain geometry, to stick the boat to the smooth sea surface which is hidden during render, and 2 bone to use for the boat constrain rotation, another sea surface with details wave sitting on top of the hidden. and the wave is done by combination of 2 runwave & 2 circular wave.

I hope my explanasion is clear…:blush:

movie 1 (1.5mb)

movie 2 (3mb)

project file

regards,
Loon
:slight_smile:

#34

Good idea that man! That would probably solve the issue i had :slight_smile:
Ian

#35

OK, back to the original post intention, which i applaud as this kind of things put your brain to work and sometimes are lifesavers.

I should say that i´m not that good with EIAS, as i only have the DVG Toolkit (i´m seriously considering to upgrade or even to fully switch), being LW my main working tool for the moment being (has been for the last 8 years), but i do like to do things from a no plugin point of view, understanding that 3rd party efforts will always make these tries much better, but i´m positive as well that on knowing the ground level approach is always good.

For the sea i´d use a highly divided poly mesh to displace and animate either using a fractal noise or fractal bumps approach (or I2M in this particular case of being broke).
For the boat, i´d parent a null to the sea surface to control displacement of the boat, parent to it a second null to control the boat´s attitude and a third one to control the boats secondary motion. The boat would be parented to this last null. When the ocean mesh gets in motion the boat follows along, and using the middle nulls the boat movement can be refined to cutomer´s wishes.

For the clouds i´d use several layers of fractal noise mapped to a wide dome with varying parameters to add , well, complexity. This could also be animated.

For the rain, several layers (ala screens) of flat polygons placed in front of the camera with (again) fractal noise animated and stretched in the Y axis (transparency channel).

Some non linear fog to mask the limits and visibility of the meshes and we are almost there. As in regards to lighting, low ambient, a few low intensity shadow casting lights (and some other shadowless) around the scene, and if at all possible, proper textures to aid in reproducing lighting conditions amidst a storm.

As you can see, fractal noise is my friend, but this is a very simplistic approach that can be improved a lot by introducing 3rd party helper tools.

From my somewhat limited experience with EI (DVG) i can see that LW and EI share very similar procedural shaders, including the fractal noise and bumps, and i have done some things in the past with LW using this approach (adding extras of course to include foam and other stuff).

cheers
JC

#36

Excellent work guys… now you’re thinking. Finding a method to move the boat on a less turbulent hidden sea is good thinking. The geometry constraint is still picking up a lot of noise in your examples Yhloon. Has anyone tried using I2M’s displacement capabilities instead of a geometry constraint?

What would be fun, a little later, would be if someone WITH psunami could give us a quick little demo on what it can do. It would be nice…comparitively speaking, to see the difference.

#37

WIP Storm animation 1

Really have to try with the boat constrained to a Smooth sea surface. I’m working on rain with PP. This is lunch hour work, so it’s not going fast. Lots of fun though. I learned a trick for Photoshop lightning:

#38

Richard…

Looks like we’re still having issues with the geometry constraint and getting reasonably smooth animation. The constraint is popping across the deformed mesh and we’re seeing those little hits in the animation. This needs to be solved. Cool trick on the lightning.

:slight_smile:

Ideas?

#39

In the last animation the boat in NOT constrained to a smooth mesh like Loon suggested.
I will try his idea to see if the movement is smoother.

#40

I’ll look into this, maybe increase the smooth surface poly count will solve it.

Loon