Tidal Wave

[traiano]

Hi

I want to do a Tidal wave braking.

It has to be a large wave with a LOT of foam and with a deadly curl.

I made this rig so far for the surface with cloth.

https://vimeo.com/62003308

Do you think it is better to put this surface animation inside an Ocean Tank 12.5 or it is better to do the traditional way of emitting flip fluids towards this surface and work on foam with velocity dependant?

[traiano]

I have a rig and a setup. I practised with low rez first to get an idea of real scale speed and timing.

Im not using the new Ocean tools, Im doing the traditional way with flip fluids. this means I create I fluid simulation and I export particles velocity and surface, so from there with vopsops i can create foam and wherever i desire based of the velocities in the main fluid sim..

First of all, I made a real scale Volume container.

Working in low rez, i took the perfect speed and timing. Then i cranked my particle separation to a hot paramenter like 0.05

My simulation is 500 Frames. I wont show 500 Frames. But I saw that I need 250 Frames to fill the real scale container in real time.

So then is when my Wave is pumped. A cylinder shape geometry moves very fast in a few frames, and this cause a real wave that translates inside the container increasing size upon time and braking a curl due to gravity.

While my container fills, the water goes up in a slightly uphill vector. Gravity is very low and Friction is very low so that Liquid travel fast and smooth inside the container towards the Pump.

When the liquid fills container, the pump wave gets in action, there is when my gravity goes up to real world scale and my friction very high so that all the water grabs the shock of the pump and the Curl generates and then it Brakes nicely.

[traiano]

[traiano]

Velocity workflow

Incoming Curl

Incoming Brokenwave white water

Edited March 21, 2013 by traiano

[traiano]

Incoming tsunami

Does anybody know how to make a shader that is like dark with dirt foam?

[nFrame]

Hmmmm. the shape is starting to look nice, but it more resembles a 'tidal wave' than a tsunami wave. tsunami's are giant surges of water, they don't necessarily have the curling face/crest like what your working on. Either way, it's a great start, and I like the form it's taking on. more interesting than a tsunami anyways. regardless, I get the idea of the shot

( Just noticed the thread title says Tidal wave... lol )

some notes: it's not selling the scale for me, it kinda just feels like a normal size beach-break wind wave. I'd work on getting the shape and scale right before moving on to sprays, and whitewater. Camera placement, and focal length IMO are key to selling scale. Also, if you've ever seen wave's from an aerial shot, you know they don't approach land in a perfectly straight line perpendicular to the beach. I did a tsunami shot a while ago, and curving the wave against the beach, along with a wide angle lense, and a low camera really sold the scale.

Keep it up man!

[traiano]

Hi Frame

Thats a pretty good point actually, however I already started and finished the foam. Im about to join geometries (particle fluids + spray sim) . Right now im caching to disk the water in lighter version without velocities information so that I can see the animation in motion. Scale is pretty big actually, my container was 25x10x25.

I just want a big wave towards the camera.. so yeah thats the idea.

Can you show me that shot you mention?

[traiano]

Im testing shaders.. does anybody know a good trick to shader white water?

[traiano]

i would like to shade foam and water so that can have foamy stucco floating?

[JuriBryan]

The white water tool gives you three groups, white water foam and bubbles.

I would only use that volume shading that the tool lays down for the foam, but with a very high devision size, you might want to cache it out.

For the other two I would use particles... simple because I have the feeling that just as in the render above the volumes are to big, to chunky, to really look like spray.

If you want to go a bit nuts, you can delete 20% of the particles spheres with different sizes on them and merge them with the meshed flip sim. (keep in mind that the biggest instance should be the size of the smallest drop coming from the flip sim)

That add more detail to the sim, together with the particle white water and bubbles and the volume foam you should get what you want.

As for shading the particles... I like to us the width attribute, simply use a attribute create and set the value of the attribute to something like 0.07.

Then use a constant shader, inside of which you connect up a lighting model (I think you can only use isotropic for particles) now you have a constant shader that is self shadowing. the color of the white water will get fixed in comp.

and for a shot like this you want to use the new mist tool as well. a nice little smoke simulation to bring it all together and that simulates the "rolling" effect of the water spray that is seen in fast moving waves.

Hope that helps you a bit.

Cheers,

Juri

[traiano]

Hi Jury, where can i crank up the division size of the white water to get more detail?

I have this so far but its kinda blurry in some parts..

[JuriBryan]

In the sop that imports the particles from the white water sim.

The node that has the renderflag on calculates the volumes, and it is using the devision size of your original Flip sim. but you can change it to what ever. Try multiplying it by 0.1 that should give you a better look.

PS: I am not at home right now, so can't check in houdini if it is actually the node with the renderflag on that calculates it. but just check the nodes connected to that one, should be either the one that gets rendered or the one above it

Edited April 6, 2013 by JuriBryan

[shiming735]

thanks,Juri. It's really helpful to me.