Sea Hitting the Beach with waves and foam

[Rhys]

Got a project which i want to animate the sea hitting the beach and the water turning into foam, also with boats on the water kicking up the swell behind the boat.

I know dreamscape is an option, i've seen quite a few animation with this effect recently mainly the dubai ones. Was wondering if anyone knew a way to achieve this with or without a 3rd party plugin.

Thanks!

[joconnell]

animated geometry would be one option using gradient maps to blend between the water and foam sections. Animated splines are a fairly good bet. Feeding things into a volume select at the shore with a noise to make the foam turbulent would be a good start.

[Da_elf]

realwave is closer

[RErender]

I've been getting good results with displacement using actual footage as an animated texture map. Turns out a lot of the waters movement is encoded into the specular. After seeing your post I did a quick test with just some low res vid I found on the net 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 succesfull. The texture is just thrown together if I were to do it right I'd mix sime micro bump 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)

[Rhys]

been investigating realflow and having a look at reactor, downside with reactor is not possible to do foam of the water straight out with out having to add particles as well. Anyone have any experience with how these methods support vray?

[RayOfLight]

the only method I've seen before was with particles combined with deflectors on the beach and a vortex to create the waves breaking on the beach.