Watre Simulation - Simulations (part1)

The simulating stage for water. The simulations were done by Charles, Garrett, and Yuriya.

Comment from Garrett:

Shot 35 appeared to be a straight forward solve for the water simulation. But again scene scaling being so large and inconsistent posed some problems. When and where the scene scales got so out of whack still perplexes me. I wonder how many hands this has passed through and did no one realize that this is not the best way to work. I mean how are you supposed to compose shots if you are not even sure which frog is the largest... but I digress.

So as for water simming the fact that these shots are so large has made me an artist for guess work. Numbers for the water simulation have gotten pretty large, larger then you might expect.

But after having simulated about 10 shots now, I was able to get a solution that I think works pretty well. I’m looking forward to seeing this shot Light and Textured.

Scale issues




Solution





Comment from Yuriya:

During this milestone 3 period, I've worked on water simulation for shot 18, 17 and 42.
For these effect shots, I've imported the FBX files, which I've been exporting from Maya files with animation, to Houdini.
After importing the FBX files to Houdini, I've simulated water scenes with ripples and splashes using the water simulation template by Charles Trippe. The renders shown below is the 2nd pass of shot 17,this is exported as RIB and is handed to lighting team.
And in general, what I need to improve for other simulation shots are to create more defined ripple from the air-boat and less splashes (particle) to be visible as this type of air-boat doesn't create much splash in real.

Through this task, the difficulty I, and all the fx team faced was the scale of the Maya scene.
As all the scales of character and environment are so huge, the time spent for simulation increase significantly since we had to simulate a very large plane for water ripple, and a large number of particles. Especially for shot 18, as it is a long shot with over 200frames, a first ripple simulation took over 5hrs. This limited times of our test simulation in given time. Also the cache file size for simulation got large, that each fx shots caches were at least 2GB (nearly 10GB for shot 18).

As well as the water simulation task, I've been continuing to export Maya files to FBX files, as some shots were updated or added to work in Houdini.

Shot 17 - 2nd pass (under water view)