Eric2575

The water is a result of a lot of experiments trying to figure out how Charles Babbage did his water tutorial. There are so many variables that have to be accounted for until you get semi realistic water - it almost drove me nutty. You see, I'm not a vary smart person, but I am diligent. If I hit the nail so many times the wrong way, chances are that one day I will hit it the right way The background is just a jpg of a sunrise that I stood up at the end of the water map. Play around with the focal distance, color of the water, reflectivity, color of the light, etc, etc, and if you are lucky, you get a decent shot. The birds are three brush strokes in Photoshop - ok, ok, so I cheated on those - told you it was just a quick lighting experiment. Another thing that bugs me in this shot is what the focal distance (FD) has done to the water surface around the sub. The FD is centered kinda tight around the sub because I wanted the background, where the water ends and the sky jpg begins, to blend with a little fuzyness. Well, that part went ok, but I don't like the way the water around the sub looks closer than the water in the foreground - the ripples look bigger along the horizontal plane parallel to the sub than the ripples closer to the viewer. But, as I said, this composition was just a quickie, and for that, I'm really happy with it. P.S. Egads Chris, I was hoping my comp looks a little better than the pic of the Stingray? I do remember seeing something about the super puppets.

Thanks for pointing that out...I've been up too long working on this and that...yawn...should have know...yeah, I knew that Wait till you see the underwater shots. Hey, Chris - I searched the forum for Stingray and came up with zip. What is Stingray? I probably know that one too, but am just too tired to realize it

Hi all: This is a quick test of the Nautilus on the surface with a klieg as the sun and a fill light in front of the sub for a little ambiance. The problem lies with the sub's shadows reflected on the surface of the water - they are casting in the wrong direction. The light source is in the back to the left, ergo the shadows should be pointing to the front right, yet they seem to be pointing straight at the viewer. No diff with the fill off. Any ideas?

Hi Drago: I have been working on that tutorial and am about to make a tutorial similar to it for newer versions of AM. At the time that tut was written, you had to create an action to animate the water. In newer versions of AM, you animate the materials in the chor after unchecking the little red mark behind the wave model. Unchecking the mark will allow you to see the hidden properties of the model, which will give you acces to the material and the x/y/z translate coordinates that have to be changed over time to animate the material on the wave model. I know this is a lot at once, but I hope it gets you on the right track. Like I said, I will be working on a video tutorial for creating water and hope to have it done in the next week or two, time permitting. Let me know how far you get. Eric

Nice work, very likeable gull!!

Problem solved!! I am somewhat embarrassed that I haven't noticed this before, but I dropped the sub model into the animation at frame zero at it's normal size - the enlarged size you see in the pics - then I reduced the sub's size and moved it around. While doing the moving and resizing, I somehow changed the timeline. If I would have rendered a TGA at the last time increment recorded, in this case 4:34 it would have come out great. Well, I kept recording to file at frame zero, the frame that I dropped the model into the chor at it's normal size. That is why I kept getting the artifacts, because I was rendering the sub way too close to the camera. Thanks all for your input and patience with me, hope this may help someone as dumb as me in the future

Take a look at this render to file on the right - the sub is scaled way up in size compared to the water grid. The smaller pane on the left shows the top view in the chor that I rendered to file. Nothing was changed, yet the rendered results are way out of whack.

I tried another render with the sub and got the same artifacts. Notice the water is dark again??? And yes, I am not changing anything but the models in the same scene. Will try a render from the top. The render from the top is also very strange - the orientation from the view in the chor has changed from the model's diagonal position to a vertical position and zoomed in very close. This is really weird. From left to right, the pic shows the render to file with the sub, the chor as seen in AM top down, and a render from the top down.

Ok, the submarine must be the problem, because the basketball rendered fine

V.11.1 I shut down the computer and restarted everything. Took out the sub and rendered to file the water; below is the result. Now the water doesn't look as dark as it did nefore and the background lightened up too. As I am writing this, I am rendering the water again, but this time I added a basketball. I'll post that as soon as it's done.

The left pic is a quick render with the sub above the water - the right pic is the same scene with a render to file. I have no clue why the render to file is not working. Sorry guys, I did not update the page and did not see your posts. Yes, the ground plane is deleted from the chor. The chor is composed of the Babbage water plane, which seems to render fine mostly, the camera, key and fill light, rim, the sub model, and another light that is supposed to simulate the sun reflecting off the water. As you can see in the attached pic, quick render shows both the water plane and the sub, but when I render to file, I get either the garbage in the pic above, or the latest version of pretty much nothing as seen in the right panel below.

I created some water ala Chuck Babbage and wanted to place my submarine in the middle to simulate the sub on the surface. When I render the water by itself, it looks great. When I render the sub by itself, that also looks pretty cool. When I combine both in the chor, I get this: see attached. Does anyone have any idea why this might be happening? I can't attach the file due to high cp count. p.s. I just did a render again in case this was a fluke, but I got the same results. Multipass is off, fog is off, the scene is in camera view, targa sequence is on, and the render takes about an hour - certainly long enough to also render the missing sub. Oh yeah, resolution is set very high at 1920 x 1200 so I can put the finished pic on my 23" monitor - if I ever get a pic out of this. p.s.p.s. Just did another render, this time in vga with same results.

Ross, first off, thanks for the reply.... Second, you're doing pretty good for someone who doesn't know (according to you )what you are talking about. When I get a chance, I'll play around with everything you mentioned. I'll let ya know what comes out of my experiment - hopefully not Frankenstein, lol. Thanks again... Eric

When you say animate the material in the Chor, what do you mean by that? You made some minor changes to the translate settings, is that what I need to do? Will uses -20 for the Y translate over 5 sec and 40 for the Z translate. Your settings are -0.4 for the Y and 0.79 for the Z. That's a whole lot of difference between yours and Will's, what accounts for the differences? If I knew what these settings did and how they are affected by the scale of the grid being used, then I might get a better understanding of the whole process. You also included a bumpWater material with an octave setting of 4. What does the bumpWater material do and what does the octave setting do? I tried to render the chor of your file and was amazed at the length of time it took to render just a few frames. After leaving the computer to render and coming back 15 min later, it had only done about 2%. Is there any way to change the parameters, maybe the density of the mesh or anything else to speed the render time? The model I want to use with this water simulation is already a time hog and I am beginning to think that together the two may take weeks to render. Stian, how do I embed the water map object?

I have gotten to the point of animating the water map as per tut, but only get a couple of seconds of choppy movement on the displacement map, not the smooth rolling motion in the tutorial clip. The tut is written with v.10 in mind and does not translate exactly into v.11. I am missing something, somewhere and can't figure out what. Can someone please help me figure this out? I was able to do it once, but am unable to repeat it. Help. I'm going to upload what I have in the WIP section. If anyone can look at my file and get it to work, I'd be ecstatic. Eric Water_Tut.prj

John: You are a master at putting rough ideas into quick presentations. Your mind must always be going 100 Mph. I'll check out your file and try to apply if it's the look I am trying to achieve. Will post a little later.

If I wanted to make a sphere about 6 feet in diameter and wanted it to radiate a light or glow for several feet in all directions (like a giant lightbulb with volumetrics turned on) how would I do it? I want the falloff to be further out than "glow" can provide. Any ideas? In the pic, you'll notice that the light projection is coming from slightly in front of the dome (klieg) I want the light projection to come from all around the dome.

This is a 9x multipass render. The focus is set correctly, but the results are out of focus and jittery. What am I doing wrong besides everything?

I am playing around with spotlights (klieg) and the source they come from. I made a box with a small translucent dome in the front of it. Inside the box I put a telephone - all for experimentation purposes only. In an action window I put a "bulb" light source in the dome and a klieg just in front of the dome. The klieg has volumetrics turned on to see a nice beam coming from the box. The illusion is to make the viewer believe the beam is eminating from the light source in the box through the dome to the outside. The dome has glow turned on. When I do a Q render in the action window, everything looks pretty good - the telephone can be seen throught the translucent dome, the bulb on the inside of the box is seen illuminating the telephone and insides, and the klieg is sending a beam away from the box. I thought, not bad, let's do a render in the chor. In the chor, I turned off all lights except the bulb and the klieg. When I render, the dome it is very dark and hardly shows any light coming from the inside. I then turned the transparency of the dome up to 100% - not diff. Then I cranked up the intensity of the inside light up to 800% with hardly a difference. Turning volumetrics on the bulb did not do the trick either. Zooming in on the dome gave the klieg beam some unwanted steps too, and the beam has lost the blue tint I gave it in the action window - see pic. What do I need to do to make the inside of the box come alive with light as seen through the clear dome. This is for my submarine model.

As my soul gets carried off into the great unknown....I ask myself....were there more shooters on the grassy knoll? Could a man really survive the radiation levels of the Van Allen Belt? ...Will the Babbage water tutorial legend ever be affirmed?..............Wait, I see a light.......I'll have the answers soon..........drifting out of sight and mind.

Thanks. The glass is actually a dome - I would like the effect of the light radiating out of the dome into the water. At this point I have a bulb right in front of the dome and a klieg just outside the dome. This is not giving me what I want. The bulb does a nice job, but the klieg can't follow the curve of the dome and looks just like what it is, a flat light source just outside the glass dome. Not what I am after. You were right about the weird beams being caused by the klieg inside the glass dome. I was hoping to eliminate the flatness of the klieg by putting it inside the dome. Still not getting it right. I spoke too soon. In the action window, the light renders pretty good, but in the chor, it has some more problems. The attached image shows what I mean. These are two separate images, the top being from the chor, the bottom from the action window. This should be easy, why am I having so many problems with a simple light????

Ok, if someone is not going to show me how to get the Babbage tutorial to work on V.11.1, then I am GOING TO HOLD MY BREATH TILL I TURN BLUE!!! I mean it.....I really will, you know......not one single breath.....it'll be all on your shoulders....blue I tell you! . . . . Ok, I'm starting to hold my breath now............... . . . Whimper, whimper.....please someone save me......I'm starting to see stars....it's getting so cold and dark....gasp.....choke....................aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaarghhhhhhhhhhh!

I have a klieg shining out of the side of the sub that casts these wierd beams. I just want a smooth diffuse beam. Tried rendering with multi pass and without - both show same funky beams. Tried volumetrics on and off, no difference. Anyone? There is also a plain bulb in the wheelhouse which is not doing what I want. I want the bulb to dramatically illuminate the inside of the wheelhouse with a good amount of light shining through the bulb windows but not through the rest of the hull. Any suggestions?

Thanks for pointing that out. I was so happy to have gotten the spiral down, I didn't notice the direction of spin

Thanks guys, I got the spiral down with the duplicator.