Tweet
We just completed a crazy fast turnaround time simulation of a dolphin fin moving through the surface of some water. The water started as a live action plate, but we ended up re-doing the water in CGI to get the interaction proper. The motion of the water surface had to reasonably match the live action water because we see it in a later shot.
We ended up using Phoenix FD for the liquids and foam (splashes never looked good so we just used foam). We used Ocean mode with the Phoenix texture for displacement in Ocean mode. This is where the difficulties came into play. The foam would not properly displace with the ocean surface. It kept going above and below the surface. Due to time constraints and a couple sleepless nights in a row we ended up rendering the foam separately without the water and then comping it is on top with masks and fractal noise mattes, etc. to make it look good on the surface.
I would love to see some way to set up the ocean displacement before the simulation and then have Phoenix use this displacement to drive the interaction of the foam /splashes with the water surface.
In hindsight perhaps you could do this with Resimulate Particles using a second Phoenix FD? Hmmm...
Also, we kept running into flickering when rendering the foam on the render farm. I double checked, and even reinstalled the same build of Phoenix on all the nodes. (Not the latest build, mind you. What we had installed when we got this quick project which was 25058.) Was/is there a known issue with this? Ran out of time and ended up just rendering it on the fastest machine. Luckily Phoenix is pretty fast to render!
If things ever calm down we will move over to Max 2016 and the latest build.
We ended up using Phoenix FD for the liquids and foam (splashes never looked good so we just used foam). We used Ocean mode with the Phoenix texture for displacement in Ocean mode. This is where the difficulties came into play. The foam would not properly displace with the ocean surface. It kept going above and below the surface. Due to time constraints and a couple sleepless nights in a row we ended up rendering the foam separately without the water and then comping it is on top with masks and fractal noise mattes, etc. to make it look good on the surface.
I would love to see some way to set up the ocean displacement before the simulation and then have Phoenix use this displacement to drive the interaction of the foam /splashes with the water surface.
In hindsight perhaps you could do this with Resimulate Particles using a second Phoenix FD? Hmmm...
Also, we kept running into flickering when rendering the foam on the render farm. I double checked, and even reinstalled the same build of Phoenix on all the nodes. (Not the latest build, mind you. What we had installed when we got this quick project which was 25058.) Was/is there a known issue with this? Ran out of time and ended up just rendering it on the fastest machine. Luckily Phoenix is pretty fast to render!
If things ever calm down we will move over to Max 2016 and the latest build.
Comment