Phoenix for ocean sims!

[joconnell]

Heya Folks!

I'm helping someone with a pitch for a tv show which involves a few ocean shots. One of them is a close up where you'll see the hull of the boat breaking through some waves so I'll have to have some interaction here. I'm having a play with the wave force - as you guys have mentioned it needs a bit of work to solve the edge reflection issues to make it easier to blend into the infinite ocean patch. What I also find is with the displacement options, if you try to drive the water with wave force and then apply the ocean tex to displace after, it'll mess up any water that's splashing over the surface. Previously in the Naiad days, I used to use the droplet parameter to make sure the displacement wasn't applied to any of the particles above the main body of the surface - you could mask your displacement to only the flat areas. You could do the same with prt files exported from naiad and then mesh in frost also. Would it be possible to get some of this type of functionality into phoenix? Also is there any kind of way we could limit the area of the wave force influence so again we could have it gradually fade off so that the sim isn't splashing as much at the edges and causing issues when we try to extend into the infinite ocean?

Cheers, and here's some rubbish playblasts

[Svetlin.Nikolov]

Indeed, I hope I can get back to the wave force soon. Currently you can map the ocean tex with scaling texmap and this should work when using the ocean tex for the wave force, so you can have fadeout near the borders. Have to extend the displacement fadeout modes as well - I guess for this kind of setup neither the height-based, nor the velocity-based displacement suppression would work for you?

[joconnell]

Ah cool - so you'd do something like use a distance tex or a uvmap with a soft square gradient to put a fade out on the wave force?

I'll have a play with suppression away from ocean level (must read the manual more ) - by ocean level does it mean the initial fill up height or can it take into account what the wave force is also doing to it?

Thanks Svetlin!

[joconnell]

Yep - away from ocean level works perfectly, on to the scaling texmap! Is it a case of putting a uv map modifier on the grid object and then a mask map with a black and white mask and the ocean tex in the main slot?

[Svetlin.Nikolov]

Ah, no, no - check the ocean tex - it has a 'scaling' slot where you can plug another texmap. This should affect the wave force too, through the ocean tex. If it doesn't, we gotta fix it

[joconnell]

Okay, how do I generate the mapping coordinates for the scaling slot though? Can I place a uv map modifier on the phoenix grid to make a planar projection?

[joconnell]

If you were doing a moving grid for example there'd have to be some way to link the mapping coordinates to the phoenix object so that the mask could travel with it!

[Svetlin.Nikolov]

A modifier won't work I'm afraid. The scaling map must have its own UVgen coordinates, so if you set it to planar from object xyz, it should do the trick.

[joconnell]

Lovely, thank you!

[Svetlin.Nikolov]

If you were doing a moving grid for example there'd have to be some way to link the mapping coordinates to the phoenix object so that the mask could travel with it!

With object xyz this should cover moving simulators too. However, an adapting simulator would start stretching the map, which I think won't be fatal for such setup

[joconnell]

The parameter that height based displacement fading is based on - is it possible to export this on to the prt particles?

What used to work very well from naiad was if you export with the droplet parameter so you only got the upfacing surface of the water sim (ocean surface plus any interaction / splash) and none of the sides / bottom particles you could have a dumb ocean plane using the same wave map that drove your sim (we did this using an old hot4max modifier) and then for the outer particles in your prt sequences, use krakatoa's magmaflow to gradually project your ocean particles down on to the dumb ocean plane as it goes towards the edges. Not accurate but maybe a bit more visually acceptable in terms of hiding the blending edge? I wonder would there also be some way to do something like an "edge extend" from the sim velocities and have it gradually mix out into the dispace of the infinite ocean? Alternatively would there be a way of setting a dampening volume around the edges to inject slower velocities and calm things towards the grid edge?

Alternatively I'll shut up and leave you guys alone for a while and you'll just solve it in the normal chaos fashion

[joconnell]

Ooh hang on, ocean cap rendering mode outputs a dumb mesh so we can volume select that and use the conform space warp: It's veeeeery slow to render though - takes ages to update transforms and prepare meshes.

[Svetlin.Nikolov]

Hmm, would it speed it up if you drop the ocean subdivs to 1, or even below?

Very nice suggestions as well! Not there yet in terms of Proceduralism, but eventually...