Wave against Rocks

[wiz4rd]

Hi all, first time posting here.

Wanted to share my first finished shot -- well finished in the sense that I'm at least slightly satisfied with the result and probably won't rebake and -render this thing at the moment.

Baked in, don't really know, +/-8 hours?: .sim, and the BGEOs for both the fluid surface and the particles. That's why I refrained from using a particle separation <0.1, although it would've probably been worth it...

Time to render all 3 cams in use was about 36hrs on a -- for this purpose -- damn slow E6300 dual core machine, most of it due to the whitecaps sprites with up to 45 minutes per frame and already turned down quality settings.

Here's a question I could need some advise on: isn't there a more efficient way to visualize the whitecaps? Turning the whitecaps particles into a particle fluid surface, then isooffset and render it as smoke is faster, but doesn't look good enough with a reasonable -- fast to calculate -- resolution.

I also tried to render the particle sprites as an individual pass. The render time was considerably faster. but there I ran into problems with reflection and refraction in/on the water surface. So I rendered everything in one single pass.

As you can see, gotta lot to learn.

So critique, comments, and hints on what to take care of are really appreciated.

Thanks!

[mightcouldb1]

I think that you should add some kind of man made object to help people get a sense of scale. It doesn't have to be anything too fancy. Maybe a dock? Right now, the scale seems rather small to me. Maybe the size of a creek, but then you have the whitecaps, which is a characteristic of torrential bodies of water. Getting there!

[wiz4rd]

Now that you mention it... I was so focused on the sim itself and the rendering part, I didn't pay attention to the scale at all. D'oh!

Quickly gimped something into one frame (see attachement; taken from an older still I rendered in my Vue days...).

I think, something like this would indeed help to sell the shot. Although I'd love to see this accomplished without any signs of people around.

I also think that the water itself doesn't look big and wild enough to appear realistic. Too clear (shader), wrong size of the wave/ripples after the crash (sim).

Sooo...

TO DO LIST:

- better optical representation of the scale (with or without any human made hints; maybe the rocks have to look more like on a steep coast --> shader).

- modify the rocks shape (the terrain object, that is).

- tweak the shader for the rocks and the water.

- buy more RAM (2gigs ain't enough, PC almost freezes), in order to be able to

- rebake the sim with smaller particle separation, which, I suspect, would let the water appear to be bigger due to more detail, right?

Looks like I've got somethings to do in my spare time.

Thanks, Jason!

Any more helpful tips?

P.S. When you said "dock", I immediately thought of an old, damaged wooden pier which gets totally destroyed by this last blow... I love those trigger words