Attached Link: The Wave in gallery

Draculaz said he was bored and needed a challenge to get a kick start.  He wanted something tough.  He accepted the challenge to duplicate a breaking wave.  See the original thread....   

   http://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php?thread_id=2752340

Since I submitted the challenge I felt I should give it a go. 

He no longer rules.  I don't want his babies.  He can keep them.  I want his women and gold. 

Comments in the gallery would be appreciated.  If I awaken the beast in Drac my glory may be short lived: but for now I will revel in the glory.  That's right Drac, put that tail between your legs and whimp away in shame.  I declare me the winner.  The mods will declare me the winner if for no other reason than t default.  HA ha ha ha.

For those who don't know Draculaz, you should visit his gallery and look at his superb modeling abilities and skills.  I'm just having fun razing him.

A little explanation on the making of the image.  I tried Bryce only first.  Bryce metaballs can create a really cool braking wave but adding detail is impossible as far as I can determine.  Metaballs want to reach out and absorb anything close to them.  They don't like each other when matting them with volumetrics either, so I resorted to creating a really primitive wave in Wings.  The Wings wave can be seen in the original thread.

It was imported into Bryce.  Lots of experimentation.  There are actually two waves with different mats embedded in each other and transparencies adjusted, both with mats I created in dte. 

There a 97 terrains and about 12 spheres added to the image. 

This forum image is the Bryce render with no AA.  You can see the artifacts I post worked out.  I used the rubber stamp brush to post work the image so I could feel it was still Bryce generated.  I blurred a couple small parts and added the signature. 

Oh, and I layered a different Bryce sky to the final image.

Well done Willie. Drac clearly was not up to the challenge.lol.

wow...

You are a winner in my book.

Love the complexity of that wave - the texturing is pretty good too - any chance that you'll be giving those mats away at all?

I'd love to see a wireframe too. Could you post one?

You da King!

That would look awesome crashing against some rocks near a light house while its raining :)

Don't know how I missed this! Awesome wave man!!

Did you know that you can stop metaballs from melding into each other by grouping them?

When do we get a tutorial on this wave creation?  It's fantastic.

Please don't think me unappreciative of the nice comments, but I don't think I could ever do a tutorial on most of my stuff, especially this wave. 

Why?  Because I really don't know how I arrived at a lot of it.  So many minutes (hours) of click this, click that, plop render, add this take away that,... hey! that looks okay.... maybe if I did this, oh that looks like crap... start over...

Take the breaking crest of the wave closest to the left of the scene for example.  I loved it.  The terrains, mats, spray (volumetrics) worked exactly as I wanted it.  But I could not get the same feel further along the wave because of the increasing angles and curves.  It is soooo much experimentation and very little previous knowledge.  

Long story short.  Zhann's tutorial "The Summoning" here at R'osity is the starting point for creating foamy waves.  It also helped that years ago I surfed and understood wave dynamics and became somewhat critical of many artistic attempts to paint or render a "real" wave.  Frogdot's method of making a tubular breaking wave with two metaballs will result in a very realworld shape but adding non-post wokded details is impossible because of metaballs properties.

I'll see if I can figure out the water mats and let you have them. 

babies, gold and women would be in order. excellent work for a bryce render and great modelling :)

Nice to see Drac is taking this lying down! :lol: