Animated water

[v-cube]

Hello,

I am searching for a solution to have a nice animated water surface in my harbour scene.
I use rhino in conjunction with bongo for my modelling and animation , so there is no real good way to do this before exporting...
After having searched the forum and other sources, I think there might be two ways for me to archive what I am looking for:

1. Apply a image sequence to the displacement node of my water surface... problem here is that I failed to find something decent, maybe someone can help me here?

2. Import an already animated and ready to use water surface done in another program.
Here I also do not know the best workflow... I think I remember that the fbx format supports baked in object animation that could be imported into octane standalone.

Maybe someone can give me a hand here, I would really appreciate it . In case someone can provide me with a working good looking loopable large water surface I would be glad to compensate you, just pm me.

Thank you in advance

Andreas

[calus]

1. Apply a image sequence to the displacement node of my water surface... problem here is that I failed to find something decent, maybe someone can help me here?
2. Import an already animated and ready to use water surface done in another program.
Here I also do not know the best workflow... I think I remember that the fbx format supports baked in object animation that could be imported into octane standalone.

Hi Andreas,
Standalone doesn't support fbx,
anyway the best format to exchange polygon cache is Alembic (.abc) which is also the one used by Standalone and widely supported by any 3D software (except rhino apparently ).
There's a lot of different solution to export animated water surface, depends on what program you have access ?
For very advanced ocean simulation you could use Maya Bifrost or Houdini or Realflow...
But one good, free and simple solution is to use Blender, there is an ocean modifiers (based on the Houdini Ocean Toolkit):
https://www.blender.org/manual/modeling ... ocean.html
You can generate animated water surface in seconds and export as texture image sequence or as Alembic geometry.
workflow is:
Create an object, add ocean modifier, animate the"time" attribute, set other parameter as you wish, click the "bake ocean" button to export as exr texture sequence, or export the mesh as alembic file.

[Phantom107]

Exporting the alembic is a no go for oceans in blender, it eats an insane amount of space and take days to export. Only feasable way is to export *.EXR images and then use those to displace the water... Currently doint a yacht project and try to make proper water too. Maybe we can exchange knowledge v-cube

[calus]

Exporting the alembic is a no go for oceans in blender, it eats an insane amount of space and take days to export.

I guess you are not using it as you should, exporting alembic is totally workable.
Maybe you tried to make all your ocean into 1 surface with the "generate" mode ?
- if you use "generate" method, the surface you get is a patch, you build you ocean with multiple instance of this alembic patch put on a grid spaced by 25 units.
the patch animation loop with itself on the sides, this works exactly like tillable textures but with animated mesh instances so you build a very wide surface from one patch, obviously the resolution of the patch of ocean should not be too small to not make the tiling obvious.
- if you use the "Displace" method, the surface displaced must have lot of polygons where it will be near the camera, and very few at the horizon.

- if you the use the EXR displacement texture, as this is also a tile maybe it's also better to make a grid of instance of one simple face displaced.

By the way, does the phantom tools support scattering/tiling of Alembic instances ?

[Phantom107]

Well I'm mostly a coder at heart, not an artist Guess I should look into it more...

Anything you hook up to the Scatter nodes is supported, so yes! The cars I use are alembics I bought somewhere, and they work perfectly.

[v-cube]

Thank you guys for the suggestions so far, I am at home today and won't make it to the office, but tomorrow I will post a picture of the scene and a few words about the current state ...

I have found a image sequence that i will try out as displacement, we will see how this works out...

Best
Andreas

[v-cube]

OK, back at the office....

in the meantime I found two files on turbosquid which might work...

1. alembic surface :
http://www.turbosquid.com/FullPreview/I ... /ID/971976

2. animated 32 bit displacement map:
http://www.turbosquid.com/FullPreview/I ... /ID/791742

since I am in a hurry a little I bought both, the displacement map seems to work out of the box, I just assigned the sequence to the displacement map node and adjusted the uvw settings.
I was also able to import the alembic geometry file, but it is a relatively small area which is tileable as far as I understand, but I have not succeeded to duplicate it in octane (I think the surface is supposed to be 100mX100m, it has to be arranged in a rectangular array...)

can anyone help me at this point?

I will post some images soon...

best

Andreas

[FrankPooleFloating]

Since you are in a hurry, I will help, even though I work in LightWave 99.99% of the time, and not Standalone... If I am not mistaken, you will want to plug your Alembic into multiple Placement nodes, which get plugged into a Geometry Group node. Offset your ocean cube thingies by 100m in Placement nodes. When you need more inputs on Geometry Group, you click Add Input in the Geometry Group node inspector. I do hope this helps, v-c.

[v-cube]

Since you are in a hurry, I will help, even though I work in LightWave 99.99% of the time, and not Standalone... If I am not mistaken, you will want to plug your Alembic into multiple Placement nodes, which get plugged into a Geometry Group node. Offset your ocean cube thingies by 100m in Placement nodes. When you need more inputs on Geometry Group, you click Add Input in the Geometry Group node inspector. I do hope this helps, v-c.

thanks for your guidance, it worked out, although it will take me quite a while to cover the whole area this way... (it is huge...) , while following your suggestion, I realised that the surface is acting a little bit funny, when I change the material settings, it does not react as expected e.g. when I alter the reflectivity... I think it has its normals pointing in the wrong direction, I tried to rotate it by applying a 180 deg rotate, this makes the material better but since it is not really symmetrical, the waves look odd... is there such a thing as a flip normal node?

best

Andreas

[FrankPooleFloating]

Guys, help him out here. I have taken him as far as I can on this one, because I've never worked with Alembic. I do everything I need in LW...