I thought I’d first go into the advanced tab of the ‘look’ area of the tool. These advanced parameters deal with defining the shading zones on the wave surface. In order to understand these zone definitions you first have to understand how the wave surface is constructed and the concept of ‘wave time’.

The wave surface is created by a number of ‘wave profiles’. We’ve seen these profiles in the previous post. Each profile is created as a blend between ten profile curves. Each of these curves represent a ‘keyframe’ in the ‘wave time’ of a wave profile. Wave time represents the life cycle of a wave from starting flat to breaking to going flat again.

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It’s been a while since the last update again, but things are starting to move quickly now. This is a first update in a series that will start showing the Breaking Wave tool as its taking shape towards a first beta release. Most of the work recently has centered around making the wave setup as easy to use as possible and to package it as a fully self-contained tool. The approach I’m taking with this is to make the UI follow the process of setting up a wave through final rendering step-by-step.

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I totally forgot to include the part on beta testing

As the wave system is getting to the point where it becomes usable for animators (I hope), I’m thinking of starting a kind of selective ‘Beta Testing Program’.

So, I’d like to invite serious parties to beta test the breaking wave animation tool. For this first run, I’d like to keep it limited to a few testers as I don’t want to drown in feedback and not have time to process it correctly. If you’re interested, please send me an email with some details on yourself and/or the company you work for and I’ll get in touch to discuss details.

Cheers,

Erik