Reign of Fury – Blender Short Film Production Blog

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