Displacement Waves

[RErender]

I've been doing some playing around with creating animated displacement maps for water FX. Turns out a lot of the waters movement is encoded into the specular. This is a quick test with just some low res vid I found on the web of a shore break. Just took it into combustion desaturated it and played with the levels a bit. I think with some HD footage shot at the right angle it could be pretty successful. The texture is just thrown together if I were to do it right I'd mix some bump and noise into the foam etc.

Here's the test http://www.varcht.com/wavetest.mov




and here is a frame from the displacement map (I also used it to mask the refraction)

[powerandrubber]

That's cool. How did you make the disp map?

[simmsimaging]

Wow - definitely working out well so far. I'm not totally clear on how you are doing it though: that's strictly displacement of a plane or something, no water dynamics a la realflow etc.? If so then it's really impressive!

b

[RErender]

Yep, just two planes, one for the sand and one for the water.

To create the displacement map I just took the footage of the waves into combustion, did some color correction on it (desaturated it and adjusted the levels), cropped it a bit and saved it out to a series of pngs and that was it.

[simmsimaging]

Cool approach - it's working quite well.

b

[Morbid Angel]

wow...
and if you have float images from dpx or cin, the displacement can be pretty nice!

[JohnVK]

That's a really nice method there, RErender! Thanks for sharing!!

[zahir3d]

waw very nice, can you explain how you do that

[zoranm]

Really cool test. Did you camera mapped the actual footage into difuse channel as well?

Zoran

[RErender]

wow...
and if you have float images from dpx or cin, the displacement can be pretty nice!

Yes, I think it could look very good. I was also thinking that if there was a way to create an animated normal map from the water surface and used with rgb displacement the results would be perfect. I also was wondering what could be done with a height map created with a 2d simulator...

Really cool test. Did you camera mapped the actual footage into difuse channel as well?

Zoran

Just a planar map, I did use the same map as the refraction amount and as a mix map for the diffuse between blue and white.

waw very nice, can you explain how you do that

Really just as simple as I stated in the above posts. I used the animated texture as a displacement map for vray 3d displacement.

Here is a section of the displacement map if anyone wants to try it themselves. Might be a little blockier from the compression but should still work.

http://www.varcht.com/wave_disp.mov

[pskdude]

wow this is freaking incredible nice work.

[Da_elf]

i wish i could get my hands on the scene to study it

[rmejia]

Nice work with the displacement. Looks very good!

[Tdog]

wassup Shortz
Pretty sweet idea, how did you add the sequence as a map to the Displacement modifier. ILF?
Pretty cool man


IFL? i ment
And yes
Tried it works pretty damn good
thanks for the tip man