As I’m wrapping up another fun project, it is time for some long overdue updates on my blog.

I still haven’t found the time/energy to make that ‘build a wave animation’ screen capture. This is still very much in the planning but I’m going to stop promising it on a concrete schedule as more work is coming up shortly and there is only so much time in a day.

In the mean time, I’ve got some really cool tool development just about to get started, extending my efforts in water/object interactions and bubble advection so far, into a toolset that is able to create some really nice looking splashes and foam effects (both above, on and below the water surface). I’ll be adding the same spray and foam functionality to the breaking wave and ocean displacement tools as well, which should be really cool!

So, plenty to cool stuff on its way!

With a bit of luck I’ll find more time to keep updating the blog in the coming weeks than I have the last month and a half.

Cheers,

Erik

Hi,

It’s been too long since my last blog, but I guess that’s what you can expect of ‘internal’ projects, they get pushed around endlessly. Anyway, FMX was great and it was cool to see my wave tools shown as part of the Houdini Master Classes.

In the coming days I hope to post a short video walkthrough on using the wave tools to create a breaking wave animation live .

In the mean time I’ve done a test I’d been planning to do for a while now. It’s all fun to have ocean wave displacements that look ok, but without interactions with objects in the water its quite limited. So I had some idea’s on adding some stuff to create wave-object interaction without having to run a full fluid sim. In the end the goal is still to create water tools that are as much as possible interactive.

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Hi,

I’m proud to be able to say now that SideFX‘s Jeff Wagner will be demoing my wave tools as part of his ‘Advanced VFX In Houdini’ master classes at FMX this year!

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Here’s another sneak preview on a big update coming up soon. The surfacing part of the DEFBreakingWave HDA is all but at version 1.0 (at least at beta level). I’m doing the ‘final’ touches on the UI to make it more streamlined and logical.

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Hi,

Phew! It has been a LOOOOOONG time coming, but I’m finally ready to update on the new Gerstner displacement, as implemented within the breaking wave tool. Most of the time it took between the previous update (the sneak preview) had to do with a completely new addition to the displacement of the lip of the wave, which required some dynamic simulation stuff using a Sop Solver in DOP’s.

I’ve now fully integrated the Gerstner logic into the wave system. The main thing I’ve got more work on is the UI. The Gerstner calcs can get you really nice results but the parameters are very sensitive and have strong relationships with each other. This means that sometimes changing a value by a small amount can have really big impact on the final result. By experience I’m starting to get a feel on what relationships between parameters will lead to most natural results so I can build in those relationships into the UI, which will greatly help in setting up nice looking wave displacements quickly.

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Hi,

Here’s a sneak preview of the now integrated Gerstner displacement system driving ocean surface displacement, procedural lip foam texture and lip spray particle source creation.

Cheers,

Erik

Hi,

Just before we move into the next year/decade, I’d like to post a quick update on the wave system. I’ve by now almost fully integrated the new Gerstner based wave displacement logic into my breaking wave system. It’s mostly used for now to generate higher level waves on top of the surfing waves. I have some further developed idea’s on how I can integrate the animatable waves completely into a Gerstner based wave system which would be really powerful, but that’s definitely for next year. (more…)

Before I get into the displacement functionality of the wave tool, I’d like to take a little time to go through some foundation work I did to improve displacements.

Up till now I was using regular noise functions to create the displacement of the ocean surface. This looks kind of ok as long as you don’t look to closely at it. The problem with regular noise functions is that the wave forms they generate have similar roundness at the top and the trough of the waves. Real waves, however tend to be ‘sharper’ at their tops and rounder at the troughs. So I thought, I’d better fix that before I continue with the displacement functionality of the wave tool.

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Shading time… After a few ‘false starts’ it is time to go through the shading side of the wave system.

Before I get into the shader itself, I thought I’d be a good idea to quickly recap how the UV’s of the wave are integrated into the UV space of the ocean surface. Luckily, I have already posted those details on this here: Another refactoring.

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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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