ADVANCED WATER AND SKY TUTORIALS???

[doneydonydone]

Hello everyone - ill just introduce myself then get down to business

Im Lee a Student of Special Effects at Bolton Uni England

Im interested in trying to recreate some of the images over at trinity3D

http://trinity3d.com/store/DreamScape-25-p-1026.html

particularly the bottom movies of water ( which look amazing ) and also the realistic clouds at the top of the page

does anyone know of some advanced tutorials??

or anyone know who made the water movies on that page??

cheers for any help

[Steve Green]

Yup, that'll be me - on the ocean stuff at least.

I keep planning to get a tutorial done, but work keeps getting in the way...

There's nothing too fancy going on really, it's just a big cheat. Whack your grid detail up to the maximum, knock down the height scale a bit, and use a photo of real foam in a blend map, using real-world scale mapping to mask the Dreamscape Seamaterial and a white standard self-illuminated material.

If you have a poke around the Max forum on CGTalk and do search for foamy stormy sea, there's a rambling thread which might have a bit more detail on it.

Cheers

Steve

[doneydonydone]

ahhh - thx for the reply chief

i'll have a look around and also i need to experiment and read the manual cos im still unsure of how to add a photo as a foam map

cheers for the pointers steve

[Steve Green]

There's nothing really in the manual about using photos TBH.

Basically you create a blend material.

Seamaterial in one slot
White slightly self-illuminated standard material in the other
Photo in the mask map slot, with the map set to 'use real world scale' and a value of say, 20x20 for starters depending on the size of your sea.

So the foam effect there has no bearing on the choppiness of the water, it's just global, although you could mask it off so it appears just on the tips.

However, you can use photos within the foam map that you put in a Seamaterial, in the density slot, which will be in addition to the foam created by the blend map trick. This would be animated.

there are a ton of tricks you can do, but the blend trick gets you 90% of the way.

[hometime]

If you are talking about the cloud render on the linked page, second from the top,
it's one of mine.
You can find settings linked here:
http://hometime.net/dreamscape2.htm

I haven't checked these forums in a while, sorry.
Don