Plug and play water animation

[digitalis99]

With the help of many here, I've been able to get a plug and play water animation to the point where I think it would be nice to release for review.  I messed with the PF settings for several hours before I finally have a mild grasp of what most settings do.  This initial group of nodes generates scale, sine-like, moving ripple sets based on the current animation frame.  This allows the user to focus on other aspects of their animation and not have to worry about the water too much.  The speed of the waves and the direction they move are adjustable on a per set basis, so if you have a shoreline you can make them wash toward the shore.

I haven't messed with foam yet...that's next.

http://vimeo.com/33063636

[Dune]

This is starting to look good. But to really see the effect, you'd have to raise the displacements, IMO.

For foam, this clip is a very simple setup I just made this morning, which has a nice effect. You might like to add nodes like a default shader for foam colors and translucency, some tiny stones with a reflective shader for little foam bubbles (blended by the foam distribution), or whatever. You can also put the foam-white before the water, so it's transparent and shiny by the water shader. Don't use to much displacement then as this increases render time enormously.

[digitalis99]

Cool, thanks for the leg up.  I haven't had a chance to check it out yet, but I will.  I was working on another example of my wave animation method.  I posted it here:
http://vimeo.com/33113217

Yes, the shore foam is ridiculous, the damp sand is far too reflective, and the render suffers from the GI animation problems that I only now know about.  Other than that, though, it's working to some degree.

[TheBadger]

Great experiments D99, keep it up man

[digitalis99]

I will indeed.  Here's combining my animated waves with a moving jet ski and wake image map.  I applied a cloud to the image map and moving PF to the cloud.  It obviously needs lots and lots of tweaking in a variety of areas, but this is a proof of concept test.

http://vimeo.com/33203891

[digitalis99]

http://vimeo.com/33605434

I'm finally getting somewhere with these PF's.  This is two PF's that are highly tweaked instead of several.  The result is a nice, automated ripple set that looks something like you'd find on a calm-ish inland lake.

[Dune]

Looking good, be it a little fast. I'm sure that if you put some higher perlin underneath, that moves from left to right, and raise these small displacements when the perlin is at its highest point, it would work well.