Here's my next update on the Waterfall Set. I'm working on the water at the moment. Still a lot of work to do.

Very nice, I like the scale and it just seems to fit with the story (not too big, and not too small). I can't wait to see more.


Steve

Looking good. I expected it to be wider but maybe there's something in the script preventing it.

Looks really good. Are you using the same technique for the waterfall as Mark did on TWO?

Above the waterfall, it is definitely going to have to be wider, because Tin Man has a whole adventure on the river bottom. I made it more intimate at the bottom because Capn Bill is suppose to fish Scarecrow out of the water with his wooden leg and, although now it's pretty obvious there is no way that is going to work, when I started I thought it would be more possible for Bill to reach Scarecrow with his leg if the pool were a little smaller.


There was a waterfall in TWO? Where?
I don't know what technique Mark used. What did he do? Maybe it will help me.

There was a waterfall at the end of scarecrow song (2_4_35? 36?) -

I don't see a posting on the forum - but heres some imagery of the stream

http://www.hash.com/forums/index.php?s=&am...st&p=251797

What you are doing is very lovely and looks like a wonderful wall of sheets of water coming down a wide waterfall

You can get a glimpse of the waterfall on TWO on youtube at the very, very end of song - it's a narrow waterfall and the camera doesn't get that close.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tqsCBH2A5gg

Thanks for the links Nancy! That is some beautiful water.
I can't get Material bumps maps to work though for some reason. I create a nice black and white Material, but when I set "Bump Percent" to 100% (or any value for that matter) is just renders flat.
Can anyone else gat bump materials to work in v15a (web subscription)?

Edit: Well, now it appears to be working. Not sure what I did, strange...

Getting closer. I hope we will be able to use Fog in this movie. It makes a huge difference.

Excellent! I want to say abit more height to make it seem more formidable, but it'd probably take alot of work for something not so vital. Perhaps you could use particles to create splashes at the bottom of the fall.

It's looking fantastic Holmes. It's 100 times better than what I did in TWO. I'm glad I'm not the one doing this set, I wouldn't even come close to what you have. As long as I stay away from the sets, texturing and lighting, you may have a real movie this time around. The work I did on TWO was pretty lame.

You may consider it so but I assure you your work really made the movie.
I noticed you got a plug in the 100th issue of 3D World magazine too!

You got skills.

Holmes,
That is beautiful stuff!

Wow man, you really need to increase your pride level. Obviously I disagree.

Thanks Mark!
You are a tremendous asset to these movies. If you really believe what you just wrote, then you are sadly fooling yourself and need someone to kick you in the backside.
Plus, we're all getting better! We are all MUCH better by the end of TWO than when we started.
We're all, YOU included, going to kick ass in SO.

Waterfalls don't really splash that much at the bottom. They splash a little bit but mostly they churn the water into a white froth and emit a lot of mist (which I haven't added yet). Here's a picture to illustrate that.

Good idea for a double tiered waterfall (I know where that is).

Your new shots look terrific as well. Are you thinking of keeping the bottom tier wide like you had ? - I like the rocks embedded in the wall of the fall like you had, but would like to see them interact with the water more - so that might be harder to pull off.

(And Mark, please stop trying to steal the crown in the lunatic contest. I covet the title. I shall have to ramp up my efforts. You did some pretty terrific valuable stuff on TWO)

I would love to pull that off Nancy. I'll try a couple of things. What would really help are some good shots showing clearly how the water reacts around stones and stuff in the wall of a waterfall.

I don't know about showing clearly - but here are some shots:

http://www.zambia-the-african-safari.com/i...lls-Encarta.jpg
http://www.q2travel.co.za/pics/victoria6.jpg
http://www.canoaclubverona.it/images/foto/...ls-Zimbabwe.JPG

The stones create channels and bumps in the wall of water as the sheets coming down oscillate (somewhat repetitively) as they cover and uncover parts of the boulders, irregularities in the face of the fall

The waterfall is terrific, Holmes. Admittedly, there aren't large splashes at the base of the falls, but the outlined area in the pic., [which should be bubbles and swirling water] doesn't move at all. How difficult to add some movement there?

EDIT: Are you using 'Fluids' for this?

Thanks Kel,
I'm tryin'. I hit hit the famous "Out of memory" error and now I can't final render anything from this set even after taking out all the hair materials. I'll have to do some revamping. I'll try to put together something for the base of the falls that, at least, doesn't distract from the characters.
I'm not using Fluids. I spent a few hours playing with them but they were just taking too long to sim-tweak-sim-tweak etc for the results I was getting. For the falling water, I started with a flat grid mesh with splines every 100cm. I slapped an fbm material on it and scaled the material up so it looked appropriate for the scale. Then I increased the Y scale of the material 2-3 times the X and Z values. Then I made a new "Waterfall" Action where I animated the the material along the Y axis, so it looks like it is falling. In the chor, I dropped the "Waterfall" action on the Waterfall_Set model to animate the water. Then I made a new Pose named "Bend Water around rocks". In that Pose, I pushed and pulled splines around until it looked like the water was flowing around the rocks. (If you apply a material to a mesh, then alter the mesh in a Pose, the material will follow the mesh contour. I don't know what I would have done without that feature in AM.)

Holmes, the river and falls I did on TWO, I animated the material shortcut on the model itself, through the timeline. I set the end method to accumulate for the travel of the river and set the end method of the bump and color material to repeat. I didn't use an action or pose to animate the water. When the model is drop in the chor the water would animate automaticly no matter the length of the animation.

Do you have soft reflections on? Hair and soft reflection don't play nice together. At least in v14 they don't.

Wow...

Holmes, your explanation [ and mtpeak2's] almost made sense. This is real terra incognita for me. Not sure how you get the material to move across the grid. Or 'animating on the timeline...' What values are changing?

I ask because I'm about to need a method for falling water. A small waterfall of my own. Thanks.

Wow, thanks Mark! That's a great idea. I'll experiment with that and see if I can get it working. I just made a 1000 frame action, but your solution is much more elegant.



Kel, probably the simplest way to animate a material is to do it in the chor.
For testing, make a large sphere. Group the whole sphere and make a new group name. Next make some kind of turbulence material and make the colors of the two attributes of the turbulence black and white, or red and green (easily discernable colors). Apply the material to the group. Drag the sphere in a chor. Click on the "Show More Than Drivers" icon beside the Sphere shortcut in the chor. Drill down to the Groups container and crack open the group on which you applied the material. There you can access the properties of the material. Find the Translate properties for the material (I just translate the material itself, not the turbulence node, but I'm sure other people translate the turbulence node) . On frame 0, set the Y translate value to 0. On frame 48 (or whatever), set the y translate value to .... something .... try -100cm to start. Now render an animation and the material should move down the sphere. These are just the basics to get you started. Once you understand the principles, there are a lot of different things you can do to tweak the results.

Thanks, Holmes. I'll try this out tonight.

Here's the latest. I wanted to add a small mist cloud at the base of the falls, but both volumetric effects and volumetric lights have problems, so I think I'm going to call this "done" for now.

Is that a shaded render? The look of the falls looks better in the previous clip.

looks beautiful to me.

Thanks Nancy!

OK, here's the latest. I just had to tweak it a little more. Now I need to get everything organized and uploaded to svn.

Oh yeah, forgot to mention there are also tens of thousands of sprites in there too.

Uploaded to svn

it's so beautiful !!!!! just missing some twigs in the water...

Nice work Holmes! Though maybe flowers wouldn't grow in the middle of the falls....more moss?

Thanks
The purple is Mo Moss. The white specks on the rocks in the waterfall are actually specular highlights on the "wet" rock, but I only rendered with 1pass so the just look like white specks. I hope they will smooth out a bit when rendered with 5 passes...

wow... that´s one awesome waterfall one suggestion: if you fade the opacity over life of your foam-emitter out at the end so the particles don´t just disappear from one frame to another it will look smoother... i always do that with any kind of sprite emitter and it improves the quality a lot...

Wow! Awesome!

Since everyone is throwing suggestions at you... I'd like to see a slight camera dolly... and sound! GREAT STUFF! You must have some great falls in your neck-O-da-woods for reference.