In the last post on the Surf’s Up project, I mentioned that the next post would be on shading. Well, almost. When doing some multi-pass render tests, I noticed that something was wrong with the way the wave surface was pasted on the ocean surface.

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It’s been a while since the last update, but things have been quite crazy last two weeks, so I didn’t have time to work on this ‘internal’ project for a while.

Before I get into wave shading I thought, I’d first finish the setup part of the tool. In a previous post I had given a first glance in the ‘setup / advanced’ tab where the forces in the water are defined as it plunges in the wave’s trough.

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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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