Rigging Waves

Hey everyone,
I Am hoping to gain some insight on how i could replicate this method ( From 3dsMax) In Blender.

Any suggestions is openly welcome, and muchly appreciated. I know the blender community can solve it!:wink:

Thanks for your time.

Any information or idea’s, no matter how small would be a great help.

Sorry Mate, soft body modelling is not my area of expertise or even vague knowledge - can someone else point raph.jod in the right direction.

Clock.

This is a jumping off point workflow I made, no materials, just keyframed cross sectional shape and motion. The result of the tutorial looks like this (opengl)

And a 13 minute tutorial I made:

Here’s my take on this:

  1. You can use splines in Blender with shape keys to the get the wave control shapes. That will get you up to ~15:48 in the video.

  2. You would use a bone as the control to drive the shape changes.

  3. Set a driver on the X rotation of the bone, same as he does. But in Blender, because you’re only working with X rotation, you’ll want to switch Transform > Rotation > Quaternion (WXYZ) to Euler (XYZ). That way, it’s not so much apples-n-oranges.

  4. Linking the forward motion of the wave parts will also be done with drivers. You would use Empties in place of what he calls Points.

  5. 3DS Max’s Reaction Manager is pretty much the same as what you’ll find in Blender’s Driver window (you bring up the window by selecting the Graph Editor and using the drop-down to change it to Drivers).

You can find out about drivers at Explore Blender.
There are also quite a few tutorials on rigging, shape keys and drivers on Blender Cookie.

Hope this helps.

Photox Good and easy tutorial.

Thanks erick.

Alright, i have done some research, and created a few different wave rigs using nurbs, and lattice’s, getting some decent results, I’m Still yet to wrap my head around drivers, but a little more research should iron that out,
i do have a question though, How does one restrict the wave from affecting the entire surface of the ocean, at the moment the wave stands up as one uniformly, i am aiming to make it “peel” > only having a small portion of the ocean surface affected by the nurbs curve.
I have tried weight painting vertex groups, but it does not do anything, i’m sure its my lack of knowledge, not blender.
If anyone knows how, please don’t hesitate to reply!
I am already stoked at the response on this thread! and am experiencing the power of the blender community>its AWESOME!
Thanks for your time;)

How does one restrict the wave from affecting the entire surface of the ocean, at the moment the wave stands up as one uniformly, i am aiming to make it “peel” > only having a small portion of the ocean surface affected by the nurbs curve?

You mean like this?

(ocean stack at bottom is cropped, should read top to bottom oceanmod, curve mod, lattice mod)


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