pradipta

Hi,

What is the best method to show a river water is in motion? I am trying to simulate this for one of my project and its not working the way I would like the output to be.

Apart from using Real Flow type software is there any way to show flowing river, would appreciate any help. Thanks

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SandmanNinja

Particles.

Get "Deconstructing the Elements" - the best book in the world on modelling Air, Earth, Water, and Fire.

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pradipta

Thanks Joel, I have heard of that book and I will try to buy it soon.

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alrawli

Yeap another vote for 'deconstructing the elements' very well written book full of great stuff.

Ive been working on a project with an old iron work bridge and used a modified version of the river in the book with some great results. To get you by in the mean time if you make a fairly dense plane for your water surface and apply two noise modifiers to it. Then rotate both noise gizmos so they are both at 45 degrees to each other. Next adjust the valuse of the noise to give you ripples on the surface plane. You can also animate the phaze of the noise to give the appearance of the river flowing. If your using V-Ray then there are some good water materials on vraymaterials.de, i used one of the sea/ocean waters as a base then darkened it put the reflection up and made it almost transparent so the riverbed could show through and give it variation in colour and depth. A big part to getting the water right is the reflection of the environment. Ill see if ive got an image i can post tomorrow when i get back to the office.

schmoron13

assuming that you're using Max, but these work with any package assuming you're using Mental Ray.

personally, you can't go wrong with RealFlow. I used it for my thesis and it's super quick to pick up (especially the fluid simulator), and exporting it to Max is a breeze.

if not, i'd recommend one of two modes:

HEAVY DETAIL: model and texture the riverbed, then boolean the water so it's a solid sitting on the water. if you look on jeff patton's site (http://jeffpatton.cgsociety.org/blog/archive/2007/1/), he has a great caustics water tutorial which when using max2008/2009, is super quick to get fantastic results. You can have caustics, refraction, the whole shabang.

LIGHT DETAIL: model the river bed, and then put in a plane for the water surface. You can then just use the arch&design water material, and set it so it's more river-like (default is ocean).it's fully animate-able and with a little tweaking you can go from silt still water to a gushing rapid. and if you really want to get nutty with it, you can add noise modifiers to tweak the plane before hand.

hope this helps

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alrawli

To be honest for a simple river then Real Flow is overkill, I can understand where your coming from but if you can get something set up in max in about 15 mins which works well, then theres no need to complicate things with more software to learn and buy.

creasia

I've been doing this since Max 3.1 all you need to do is animate the offset parameter in your material or animate the uv Map, so that it loops. Offset with the default max smoke material works nice for a moving sky effect too.

I did this with raytraced water, and it looked beautiful over top of a river bed of rocks with the bump map of rocks applied to the water as well.

milfora

Pradipta,

Try out Pete Drapers website - full of really great tutorials!
His 'Deconstructing the elements' books are also a must buy for any nature-type modelling

http://www.3d-palace.com/xenomorphic...doc_stream.htm

AM

Spooner04

I looked up the book on amazon. The third edition is due out in Oct. 2008. Just an FYI.

SandmanNinja

I spoke to him the other day on another web site and he's still writing it! hehehe
So, the October 2008 I'd say is very tentative.

He promises all new tutorials and he uses Max 2009 for all of them. Although It isn't 100% required for all of the effects - i.e. I don't think he does anything specific to 2009, it's just if he doesn't show something with the latest and the greatest version, it 'dates' the release instantly.

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