Fluid Dynamics Help
by Gray Wilson
on
Feb 28, 2008 at 5:55:32 am
What is the best way to produce a body of water in Lightwave? I need to make a dark river flowing with low fog for a project. I've been looking at plugins for the fluid but would love any suggestions.
Re: Fluid Dynamics Help by Aaron Berger on Mar 10, 2008 at 5:29:59 pm
Depends on what you want to do in your river. If it's still you could get away with animated procedural bump maps. If you want something to interact with it (like a boat) then I've had success with using simple cloth dynamics on a subdivided plane.
The approach is highly dependent on what you are doing in the water and how close you will be to it.
Re: Fluid Dynamics Help by Gray Wilson on Mar 10, 2008 at 7:01:05 pm
The river will be still. A very dark river (oily, shiny) with a bridge over it that is part of a composition for a film. The camera will be crossing the bridge while glancing at the unusual river with a slight ground fog. I was also thinking of a procedural but didn't know if it was the best way. I didn't think of cloth so thank you. Currently, I'm stumped on how to get the side of the river to blend/interact with the ground that banks it on either side. Have any suggestions?
Re: Fluid Dynamics Help by Aaron Berger on Mar 11, 2008 at 5:16:04 pm
If you use a subdivided plane with an animated displacement map for the big motions you can get a nice movement on the water surface, with smaller waves driven by a bump map. To get the water to blend onto the shore I suggest looking into adding a ramp shader to your transparency (of the water) and set the input parameter to Surface Thickness. Once your fine tune the transparency ramp you can get the water to sort of fade out along the river bank.
Once again, it depends on what the environment looks like, but this ramp shader trick should help you out regardless.
