Hi all, so I’m the art director on an animated feature film that’s due for release in 2020 and we’ve come across a little problem that we’re hoping the general community might have some answers to.
So in the film there’s going to be a lot of water (ocean) – in varying stages from calm seas to full on stormy seas. The basics of water seem pretty straight forward – it has to reflect, it’s going to be somewhat see through – maybe we’ll have some subsurface scattering if it catches the sunlight. The thing that is a bit more complex is how bubbles come together to create white peaks on waves that you see. We’re using 3DsMax for the project because that’s what the core team are skilled with but we’re not against using other software to get things done – whatever will work basically.
We’re not looking to get a full on real flow simulation going here or have water that looks super realistic a la Moanna etc…The film is fairly stylised and we simply don’t have the money to do that kind of thing. I’m no programmer but logically I’m thinking that any solution might go along these lines?
a. IS there a way to procedurally generate a material that creates bubbles and then has them come together into shapes like rings etc… we’ve tried 3DSMax’s native tools – i.e. cellular which is awesome for caustic lighting effects when looking at the surface of water from below BUT isn’t right for water when viewed from the surface. Noise is great for the normals to create in between bumps and also to distort the mesh organically BUT if someone knows of a max plugin or native material that can do that, it would be awesome.
b. IS there a way to tell this material to then become denser or not based on height – i.e. so that only the peaks of a wave will get white? – actually a way for a material to organise itself based on height would be awesome – i.e. it would enable us to define one material on top faces of rocks etc… as opposed to the sides. Is there a way for 3dsmax to do this natively?
I’m not a technical max user so hopefully the more technically minded of you guys out there might have some answers!
For that matter – if anyone CAN help us on a professional basis, just message me!
Thanks in advance @_@
Hi there.
If you are using max 2019 you can use bifrost for particle driven water animations. But I don’t think you have time budget for those water simmulations.
Before I give you any advice on contact foams and wake foams and water discoloration towards foaming I need to know what renderer you are using.
Meanwhile you should look for plugin called HOT4Max.
It is a plugin which handles foams via vertex channel but you have to use additional resources for wake and contacts.
Also I have done some non stylized work with wake, foams and discoloration with Dreamscape (similar to HOT4Max ) about 5 years ago. [video]