My attempt at Babbage water tutorial

[Eric2575]

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

[agep]

I'll gladly take a look, not that I'm able to fix it But you need to embedd the project file. "Water map.mdl" was missing.

[rossk]

I'm not sure if you are aware of this, but since Mr. Babbage made the tutorial, A:M has allowed materials to act as displacement maps. This means that there is no need to render out an animated set of images for use as a decal. This was the step that really helped me when I ran into a problem with the tutorial.

 

So basically--

1. Make material.

2. Apply matterial to grid of cps (decently dense, the more cps you have the more definition is taken from the material)

3. Set the material to act as a displacement map.

4. In choreography, animate the attribute under the material rather than the material itself. So animate "Perlin" or whatever it is rather than the actual material's name.... yeah, I'm not really sure about this last one but it worked for me.

 

For reference, I have attached my project file.

 

Hope that helped and best of luck,

--Ross K

waterExperiment.prj

[Eric2575]

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?

[Jin-Kazama]

hi....from what i read....i cn say it's very nice but i can't open the prj cuz i have ver. 10.5....

[rossk]

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?

animating the material in the chor-- Click on the "water grid" object and change it so you can see its drivers. Upon expanding out the material, you should see the attributes that you set... I think mine is Perlin. Then go to 5 seconds on the timeline and change Perlin's translate properties to something appropriate.

 

I believe Mr. Babbages used either feet or inches while I used centimeters for my units. Further I set my scale attributes for the material different, so this accounts for why my translation properties are so different. I really don't know a ton of what I'm doing... just experiment until you find something good.

 

The bumpWater material is the bump map for the "water grid" object. The bump map controls how light bounces off the object.

 

I'm relatively new to this, so I'm not really sure how to optimize it for a shorter render time, but I'm sure someone else would have some pointers.

 

As for how the density of the grid affects the "detail" of the waves... just try deleting out large chunks from the edges of the grid object until it is only like 10 x 10 or something. Then scale it up to the original size and check out how it looks.

 

Hopefully that helps some... I really have no clue of what I'm talking about

 

Later,

--Ross

 

 

edit: Oh and to embed the model-- Just go to your project workspace and click on your model. Then go to Properties-->File Options. You should see a "Embed? Yes/No" option.

[Eric2575]

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