how to animate water?

[wackymidget]

Hi,

I want to create an animation of seawaves hitting the shore. Can anybody tell me how to do that?

Thanks!

[Hetzen]

I think that's outside Terragens realms. To make it accurate, you'd be looking at a pretty sophisticated particle system, or a very bespoke animated mask.

Which is a very good question, does Terragen accept movie files?

[PorcupineFloyd]

It should be possible the same way as with clouds.

[Hetzen]

Sorry mate, do you mean animated movies? Or how clouds interact with TG2 geometry?

[PorcupineFloyd]

There are two "Deep" versions of TG2 - with and without animation.

TG2 is capable of rendering animations, however I won't be able to help you in this matter as I have plain "Deep" version.
However I've seen on the forums someone asking about animating clouds so I believe if it's a matter of adding one shader to cloud chain then it should also work in case of water.

[old_blaggard]

You could animate water just by cycling through Y values with a transform shader, but to get realistic, directional waves would take a lot more effort.  I don't think anyone has gotten close as of yet.

[Tangled-Universe]

You could animate water just by cycling through Y values with a transform shader, but to get realistic, directional waves would take a lot more effort.  I don't think anyone has gotten close as of yet.

You made a function-node-network which created epicentric waves, isn't it? Perhaps it can be adjusted to form a single wave from a point of origin?

[Hetzen]

There are two "Deep" versions of TG2 - with and without animation.

I understand. I have the full version so far. What would be interesting to know, is if I can apply an animated mask in the form of a black and white animated .mov file to control certain movements. At the moment I'm fixed on getting stills right, but in future it'll be good to know that I can move my masks to how I want.

[cyphyr]

I think its a question of scale really. You should for example be able to create an ocean swell with smaller wavelets playing across larger ones. Something like this could be done procedurally and could work at a distance for longer shots. To make the water interact with a shore or other object line is much more difficult and I would have though your best bet would through a bespoke animated mask as has previously been said. Although Terragen dose not yet (sdk possibility?) accept avi's or bitmap sequences "all" you would really have is make individual frames for your animation rather than a simpler single animated file. You could then change the tgd files in note pad easily to use a sequentially different image for your mask. Creating that image mask sequence is the real challenge though. I "think" I've seen some fluid dynamic programs out there that output a greyscale hight map sequence (I know of one for caustics) but you'll have to Google for that I'm afraid.
Good luck and keep us posted

Richard

[Oshyan]

Although in TG2 you can animate virtually anything, it would be extremely difficult to achieve a realistic result for the kind of scene you mentioned. This is not so much because of the limitations of TG2 as the limitations of CG in general. Realistic wave-shore interaction is possible (see Flags of Our Fathers), but it requires a tremendous amount of work and very capable general-purpose software. In the future we may be able to provide some form of partial solution to this, but for now the manual animation you could do on water displacement, powerful as it may be in concept, is not likely to get you good very realistic results.

If you do want to give it a shot and you have the "Deep + Animation" version, you'll want to start with the "SA" (s-curve followed by an 'a') button that shows up next to most settings. This allows you to create keyframes. Choose an initial value for a setting, set a keyframe, then change to your target value and set another keyframe. The values will be interpolated between your two settings and if you render a frame sequence you should see it animated. You just have to animate the right values...

- Oshyan

[old_blaggard]

@T-U: Yes, my network could be adapted to form only one wave (either elegantly in fifteen minutes or sloppily in two ) but it would still be quite a task to animate it to make convincing breaking waves.  I've spent a lot of time doing tests combining aspects of that work with redirect shader techniques to achieve an animated breaking wave, but so far to no avail.

@Hetzen: You cannot use a .mov file as an animated mask, but I believe that animated image masks (where you specify Image Name = "mask[frame number].jpg" for example) will be implemented for the final release.

[Hetzen]

@Hetzen: You cannot use a .mov file as an animated mask, but I believe that animated image masks (where you specify Image Name = "mask[frame number].jpg" for example) will be implemented for the final release.

Excellent.

[cyphyr]

Just found this might take you in the right direction link and of course cryengin, yeah right lol
Richard

[dandelO]

Wow, Rippletank is great, I never knew this existed.
Thanks, Cypher!

Ahhh, the Cryengine, I love it! I've never played Crysis though, only Farcry.

[Cyber-Angel]

There is far more to wave/ shore interaction then you might think and the type of waves discussed here called shallow water waves are a vary complex phenomena that I do not have time to cover in detail, what can be said that you would require a physically based 3D Fluid Solver based on many variables such as beach shelf profile, beach slope angle and the solving of the Navier-Stokes equations and other factors pursuant to fluid dynamics as they relate to wave shore interaction.

The above is true if you wish to be fully true to the natural world, however there is much that still has to be learned about wave/shore interaction as there are things in the mechanics that cannot be directly measured and so indirect methods must therefore be used; thus data gathered via these methods is subject to debate about both is veracity and its scientific validity, the same is true in the atmospheric sciences such as the study of cloud where it can only be implied that certain phenomena take place as direct observation is not possible due to current technologies and methods of inquiry.

With all the unknown factors then, and the current state of the art in CPU and GPU form factors and relative clock speeds among other limiting factors such as the current sate of the art in the thinking in the CGI academic community on the creation of wave phenomena; while many different aspects of wave/ shore interaction have been created experimentally they have been created be differing, perhaps even incompatible methods that often yelled results of inconstant quality some of photo-realistic quality others no where close; at this time such things a well beyond the reach of some thing like TG2 without great effort and struggle.

Regards to you.

Cyber-Angel