Boat population on water : how to keep consistent level ?

[mathieubr]

Hi all.
I have some issues trying to create a large population of a boat objects sitting on water. I cannot really figure out why, but creating a population that does not sit on terrain  seems not sufficient to keep the boats level with water. One side of my population is floating over the water, and the other side is sinking deep. Since the population seems to actually be level, I can only conclude that the water level is not the same everywhere. I have tried to limit the waves and roughness, but the problem still occurs.
Am I missing something? Did you already encountered this kind of problem? how do you solve this?
Thanks a lot,
M

[Dune]

Do it as in the screenshot. Play with the patch size to control how much the boats react to smaller waves. The surface shader is only used to offset the same as the water level in the lake.
Hope this helps you on your way.

[mathieubr]

Thank you very much for your answer Dune. It really helps. In the meantime, I realized that my scene was very large and that one of my problems was the curvature of the sea. So I replaced the lake object by a Plane object and attached the water shader to it.
But your solution allows boats to actually be oriented depending on the waves on all axis, which is neat.
Thxs again.

[Oshyan]

In the next release you ought to be able to populate on a Lake or Plane object, which should help with this if you want to still use curvature. Also note that you can just turn Curvature off in the Lake object, you don't need to use a Plane if you don't want to.

- Oshyan

[Dune]

How can you turn off curvature? I don't need to, but just curious.

[Oshyan]

Well, perhaps I shouldn't have said "turn off" curvature, it's not a check box. You just remove the anchor Planet on the Planet tab and it stops referencing it for curvature.

- Oshyan

[Dune]

Why didn't I think of that