Water

For my Advanced Skills project, I have been looking into the movement of the water and for the river. Our film has the river as quite a major part of the film so we needed to work out how we were going to do it and also how we were going to get the ox, cat and rat moving through the river. It needed to be quite simple with not too much data as the files were already getting quite large so they were slow and lagging. They also had to be openable on everyones computers as some had slower computers and less powerful than others.

For the project, I tried out Realflow software, Maya particles, Maya dynamics and the ocean shader using mental ray. There were many benefits and disadvantages to each method but in the end the conclusion was that the ocean shader would be the best method with the least rendering time and give the best effect. It meant that everyone could open the files and did not add too much data to the file.

My blog shows you the different river tests using the different methods and how I got to my conclusion. Another problem we had was to get a log to float in the water which I achieved using the ocean shader. The different log tests can also be found on the blog.

The blog can be read here:

http://olyslearningjournal.blogspot.co.uk/

On my advanced skills blog are all the tests I have done to work out the settings for the river and how to get the best effect. These settings can be added to the ocean shader in the scene with the environment. I will achieve the look of the animals swimming in the river by adding wakes to them so it creates movement within the ocean shader. This can also be read on my blog.