Hi all,
Been hovering round here for a few weeks stealthily accruing knowledge for a project I'm working on. Seems like a nice place!
I'm doing a lot of shots involving water draining out of the English Channel. For the sake of render speed and matching our background plates, I'm not using Terragen water in most shots, but using the actual footage in the background, revealed by an animated matte created in Softimage.
So I have a Heightfield Generate node at the end of my tree, run that, save as .ter and bring it into Soft. All good, the tracks match up, my colour correction mattes all line up. Great. I bring a grid into the scene to represent water level, animate that from high tide to low tide, and all seems well until I look closely. The mesh from TG2 is coming in with stepped strata so rather than moving smoothly down the land, in and out of the displaced areas of my mesh, the water level appears to jump down every few frames, then go smoothly, jump down again etc. It gives a stop motion look that totally kills the realism.
Does anyone have any clues as to what is going on or how to fix this? With TG2 water in the shots, the render times rocket.
One of the tgd files is attached.
Alex