Jump to content
AutoDesSys

Creating realistic animated seawater i Renderzone


Imagix

Recommended Posts

I am doing an animation of a habor area and need to do some realistic looking seawater in minimal motion. Does anyone have a tutorial, tips og tricks of how to achieve this? Bumbmapping maybe, moving semi-transparent watersurface-textured planes etc.

 

Would appreciate some good advice, thanks!

 

Anders

Link to comment
Share on other sites

animated deform?  Search the "formZ penguin animation" on Youtube...

I am looking for something that will work for a harbour/ocean scale.

 

I have concidered using Maxwell Sea, but have not been able to get it animated yet. It's just static.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Hi Anders,

 

Did you try Rob's suggestion and did that give you what you want?  Using Maxwell Sea would probably be a bit more realistic, but would take a LOT more time to render / animate...

I found an animated displacement map on youtube, that I am trying now in fact. I will let you know how that works out.

 

I also proceeding with a Maxwell test, but have trouble animating the "reference time" parameter in the sea plugin. I can't add an animation track for it...

 

http://maxwellrender.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=108&t=44013

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Hi Imagix,

 

The correct forum for Maxwell for formZ support is here:

http://forums.formz.com/index.php?/forum/4-maxwell-render-plugin/

(The Next Limit hosted forum has been read-only; I'm not sure how it got unlocked...)

 

We are working on animated Sea for formZ; look for it in a Maxwell for formZ beta soon.

 

There is as a sample file included with the latest plugin distribution of the Bilbao Guggenheim. It has a calm, harbor-like sea you can use as a reference.

 

post-32-0-71451800-1448386352_thumb.png

 

 

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Perhaps just map an animated image onto the surface of the water and give it a subtle (static) bump map?

Ok, I tried an animated image on a surface and/or as a bump map. I have used this tecnique before, in FormZ 6.x I think. I can set it up just fine, although the animation editor window seems very slow at times. I used a quicktime movie as the texture, added the animation track and keyframes for it, but that is as far as I got...

 

I can render a single frame, but when I choose "Generate animation..."FormZ does it's thing, but there is just no output/no files in the destination folder. I also tried rendering through Maxwell, but it seems it does not support quicktime/.mov files as textures.

 

Should i use an animated gif instead or some other format?

 

Actually, it seems to me that animation have become a bit slow (and buggy) in FZ 7-8. I decided to purchase 8.5 – maybe that will improve things.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Hi Anders,

 

This is working fine for us, but if you are on Windows you will need to use the 32 bit version, since MOV files are handled "via Quicktime" and Quicktime on Windows is 32 bit only.  Was that the cause of the issue?

No, I am on a Mac (OSX 10.11). Can Maxwell or quicktime plugins conflict or something?

 

Just downloaded 8.5. Will see if it works better for me.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

The file you sent is working for us -- once we reloaded the .MOV file.  If you just reload that image, does that then work properly for you?

I tried converting the .mov to different codecs, length etc. - reloaded it many time. The project still doesn't render/create output. But I guess that has to do with something else in the project – not necessarily the .mov texture, since that worked fine within a new project.

 

The project rendered fine before I added animation and the .mov texture. Now it doesn't – even if I remove the animated ship and .mov texture.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

The boat and water are animating fine here.  Do you have an issue with the file you sent to us -- or with a different one?

I have it with the exact same one I sent to you. The boat is animated here as well (within FZ). Rendering an output just isn't possible.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Right, you can't OPEN it, but you can use the File Menu: View File command to view it, or the File Menu: Export Animation to export it to individual image files (or a MOV file)  if that's what you want...

I used to output to .fan files, but started to use separate stills instead, to avoid loss if formz went down in the rendering process. I remember it as though formz would automatically open the .fan file and bring up the conversions dialog, so I didn't think to do it any other way.

 

Anyway it worked :-) Thank you so much for you effort, helping me out!

 

Anders

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Archived

This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.

×
×
  • Create New...