Simulator waves to match infinite ocean waves?

[kangoocarl1]

I am working on ocean simulations:

I am having to actually animate the ocean (Wave Force modifier) to get waves that do hit my collision objects ("Rocks on the coast" in my case...) and this is generating my water, foam and splash simulations. These simulations work very well and I can get the Wave Force modifiere to do a great job and tweak it the way I want it to influence the waves: But also I have to/want to extend the simulation gizmo around these rocks with the infinite ocean mesh feature as the shots do show the whole ocean behind the coast.

I cannot get it done that the moovement of the oceanmesh (OceanTexture) is in accordance with the waves I am generating inside my liquid sim gizmo (wave force). Waves and their beahviour are way different however I am tying to tweak the "multipliers" of the ocean wave force and the "multiplier" in the rendering menu for the displacement of the infinite ocean mesh. Sure I did plug in the same OceanTexture into the wave force modifiere and the sim´s rendering displacement-texture slot.
Also the "ocean mesh" (as using the Ocean texture as displacement modifier for the mesh) is overlapping and hiding (in render) lots of my particles inisde the sim box since the waves are just too different). Sying this bottom line is "2 differnet wave simulations inside the simulatro and for the infinite ocean mesh".

Has anybody ran into this situation and can help me how to find a solution for this? How can I make the infinite ocean meshe´s waves go with the waves I get inside the simulator for my particles?
I have researched here in the forum and did read that there is no "automatic" alignment for this, yet, but if I cannot manage to (manually) align these waves then there is no way to use Phoenix for those shots at all -e xcept i would generate the whole large ocean as a sim - and this is far from beeing practicable....

Any help or hint or workaroudn idea - highly appreciated!

[joconnell]

It's a very very difficult thing to pull off, the infinite ocean waves are a set animation and are totally unaware of any objects around them, thus don't react / splash. The fluid sim on the other hand has to be given the space and freedom to crash into things and have all those splashes cause a natural water behavior when they fall back into the main body of the water. Since the water isn't just going in the same consistent fashion there's no way to get it to behave the same way as the dumb infinite ocean wave animation. You've got two choices for how you do this, either a comp fudge or try to do some mesh projection. I did this sequence (https://vimeo.com/84205360) a few years back (houdini sim and rendered in max vray) and we had a central sim grid like you're doing, then a large dumb infinite ocean for the rest. In our case, we took the ocean sim and selected the polys in the middle using a soft volume select, inverted this selection to get the outside of the sim and then projected these faces down on to our dumb ocean mesh. This moved the border of the ocean sim enough that it lined up fairly well, then we soft matted it on to a render of the infinite ocean in comp. Another option would be to export particles for the sim and then do a similar projection trick to stick your outer particles to the dumb ocean and then render the particles with a fluid shader rather than the sim mesh. Either way it's a bit tricky and fudgey!

[kangoocarl1]

Thanks for the reply - I did have a feeling I´d get an answer like this aka there IS no simple solution well: comping it was my first thought also - the concept of using the outer area of the sim particles for mooving/pushing the infinite ocean kinda to the right spot is a great hint. I will see if I can get this figured out. Thank you for your cool input on my question!

[Ivaylo Katev]

Indeed, the wave force produces not exactly the same result as the displaced geometry, the simulated water is smoother, there is some foam, and in general you can see clearly where the border is. However with proper camera position and waves strength, you can achieve relatively easy a result that looks not bad, you can see my very first experiments here https://vimeo.com/143147392

[kangoocarl1]

Hello Ivaylo,

so the vimeo clip (your link) was done with a mix of infinite ocean and liquid animation for the beach-waves themselves - looks very good - I will experiment with wave strength of wave force and so on and see if i can work around it like that..thanks for this hint!

Cheers,

[Ivaylo Katev]

Yes exactly. See the comments, you can find some additional info, unfortunatelly the scene is old and i can't remember the details. I think somewhere in the comments you even can fgind a link to the scene, there are three videos made with the same scene with different params