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Gerbick, warned you i was bringing it (weeks ago :D)
I am wondering how i might make a water effect with ripples and or waves animated in studio max (and then i'll export w/ swift). any tuts or ideas out there? I'm still not very good at max so the more basic, grass-roots description/tut, the better. Gracias in advancio.
Tougher to do in Flash simply because of the lack of texturing and the inability to directly render transparency.
You need some geometry -- a plane with a lot of horizontal/vertical sections will do. Bind a ripple space warp to the geometry. You can set the Amplitude1/Amplitude 2 values to generate the type of waves you desire, then animate the Wave Length parameter. This gives you nice, flowing waves. Add a camera and render with area shading. You may have to experiment with lighting to get the exact effect you want.
Contact me offlist, and I'll send you a .zip file of a MAX 4.2 scene to get started.
A more difficult problem is that of something reacting with the water within a fixed boundary that is visible to the camera. The waves must be timed to begin with something entering the water, then bounce off the wall or other item constraining the water body. This is the problem I faced in my demo reel.
A water simulator does the job nicely if you have $500 or more to drop on a plugin, but major overkill for Flash. This is especially true since you often have to make larger waves than would be realistic to get better results (more variation in the gradients) from the vector render.
I used a patch grid and manually edited the vertices to correspond with the expected wave action, including secondary and tertiary bounces off the walls of the hottub. Kind of a pain, but I was able to get really good control over the render results. You probably don't want to attempt this unless you feel comfortable working with the Master Point Controller in Track View. That's how I made quick changes to the animation.
The .SWF was rendered with outlines to generate the caustic patterns on top of the water. The outlines around the perimeter of the water body were removed. The other outlines were hand-painted in Flash for effect. The clip was comped over another render of the empty hottub and opacity adjusted in Flash. Wave timing could be easily adjusted in Flash by extending a few keyframes over two or even three frames (depending upon your frame rate). The timing can be adjusted without having to re-render and with no effect on file size.
In the end (with a bit of work), the result was adequate and significantly smaller than using a sequence of bitmaps.
have fun!
thanks a lot matrix, let me know if/when you sent me the file. look forward to trying to figure this one out.