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First Ocean test clip using the new Ocean Sim tools!

Here’s my first test clip of an ocean scene using the new tools we’ve developed in the Blender 2.56 Ocean Sim branch build. The clip shows the completed scene plus compositing breakdown (not complicated, but interesting). I opted to render out a foreground and midground ocean wave object separately, as it was more efficient. I could have enlarged a single ocean mesh to fill the screen, but blender really starts to bog down when you do that.

There are things that could be improved. The white foam is a plain material, it could use a little bump mapping to make it less smooth. You could also use an foam video texture to get a little more motion in the foam areas, but I’ve yet to get a good result without obvious tiling.

The next thing will be to float a ship on the water and get it moving realistically on the waves. We don’t yet have actual wave/object interaction yet, but developer Daniel Salazar is working on that. Also Blender cannot yet do dynamic particle emission, so no spray from the wave peaks for now. I should be able to fake some spray and a wake around the boat using manual particle objects, and displacement maps, we’ll see.

Anyway, enjoy! Hope to post a basic tutorial to get people up to speed on using the tools in order to get wider feedback from the community.

The builds are now open to the community, so head on over to http://www.savetheoceansim.com to get yours!

Cheers,
Todd

Friday, February 11th, 2011 PreProduction, Rendering, Research/Development, Tests 3 Comments

New shot for animatic in progress

Finished Shot 5a. This is the first view we get of the victims of the viking attack, the irish monks at the Lindisfarne Priory. The opening shot starts with a lone monk drawing water from the well. more to come…

Sunday, June 27th, 2010 Modelling, PreProduction, Rendering No Comments

Latest shots for Animatic

Have been able to complete the next 3 shots in the animatic. Basically the first establishing shot of the viking ship on it’s way to raiding. Then we have the next 2 shots emphasizing them starting to prepare their weapons and armour as they near the english coast line. Although it’s not really in the shots, I was able to play with the cloth simulation on the ship sail and flags, worked pretty well, once I figured out how to bake the cache to disk.

Shot 3 Frame

Shot 4a

Shot 4b

Sunday, June 20th, 2010 Rendering No Comments

Shot 3 Sample Frame

Still working on the low res animatic for this project. Was able to complete shot 3 tonight, which is the interior of the viking cheiftain’s lodge. Just a simple zoom from front to back, but it feels good to get it done.

Monday, June 14th, 2010 Modelling, PreProduction, Rendering No Comments

First fire material test….

Well, this is the first time that I’ve tried out the new fire technique using the smoke system and all I have got to say is wow!

Using the tutorial Creating realistic fire in Blender 2.5 by Miika Hämäläinen, I did this test file with a monkey head and flames burning. For such a short setup time (although it took overnight to bake the high resolution smoke cache), I am very impressed with the results. I’m pretty confident that with enough tweaking I’ll be able to use this technique for the times when I need flames in this project.

I thought the new smoke module was cool, but the fact that we can combine it with a particle system and voxel data to get a fairly easy result like this is pretty amazing! Thanks Blender Devs!

Here’s a link to the video:

Thursday, June 10th, 2010 Rendering, Tests 2 Comments

Frames from Animatic in Process

Now that the story reel has been cut together, the next actual step in the production process is to create a first level animatic. This will have the most basic animation, as well basic materials. Basically the idea is just to flesh out the poorly drawn storyreel, so that people can actually see the what the idea is.

There’s still a lot to do, but wanted to share some early frames from the animatic. If you compare them to the shots in the story reel, you’ll see some similarities (hopefully!). Cheers.