Running some test renderings of Kelvin wake patterns while preparing models of the canal boats and tug that will be needed for the scene.
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The displacement map was made from an image I found online and tweaked in Photoshop. The same image map is piped through two transform input shaders to create the bow and stern wakes. (The transform input shader is quickly becoming one of my workhorse shaders. Thanks again, Ulco.)
Previous forum discussion of Kelvin wakes:
https://planetside.co.uk/forums/index.php/topic,19721.msg194253.html#msg194253Good layman's discussion of how they're formed and how to calculate their sizes:
http://www.steelnavy.com/WavePatterns.htmI would give my eyeteeth for an application to generate Kelvin wake displacement maps. Found a few promising but broken links online for Maya plugins, etc., but not much luck till I stumbled across this:
https://www.boatdesign.net/threads/zgreen-wave-patterns-made-by-havelock-sources.36112/Seems like this might be the answer but (of course) it's DOS only. If anyone knows of a Mac (or Unix) equivalent that would be great.
I'd like to be able to generate arbitrarily sized patterns that could be accurately scaled and still extend a proper distance behind the boat. The speed limit at this time on the canal was 4 mph (to mitigate wake damage to the canal banks), so the transverse waves of the wake pattern should be about 6 feet apart.
Interesting topic – a week ago I'd never heard of Kelvin wake patterns.