This is just a volumetric test of some fire I was working on for a small 10-second animation. The animation never worked out, it is impossible to animate this fire, but it was fun to try and looked pretty cool! SO, on the one hand, I'm stoked on making interesting fire, but on the other hand? I'm very angry at Bryce for being such a poor animation utility. My problems lie in the Material Editor, the mat would disappear as I changed it's densiy attributes. Tried cutting, pasting, re-adding same mat from library, blah blah... Hopeless. Had to go to Maya for the animation of fire.

And HERE is some Brycean water, which is totally animateable. Terrain-based, with a slope-based material so that the tips of the waves get a different texture than the flatter spots... Not particularly photo-realistic, but I still think it looked good enough to share. If anyone wants either of these materials, let me know and I'll email 'em for you! Thanks for looking, go ahead and blaspheme my material attempts all you want!

In stark contrast, a simple (4-hour developement time for my rookie-self) Maya ocean on a Nurbs surface. I'll stick to Bryce for the waters, thank you!

I personally like the Maya water better, but that could just be me.

me too only polys should be upped as you can clearly see the edges nice bryce materials though the fire is really convincing in the 60 range

Aye, ysvry, I cranked up all of the options I could find. The Maya render took over half an hour, and still, alas... the artifacts... I fear I'm not quite up to speed with NURBS rendering in Maya...

I like the fire texture...Id play with that one if you'd be willing to send it.

I'm big on animation. And your right, bryce is woefully inadequate when trying to animate smoke, dust or fire. There's an app out there called "Particle Illusion". They have a fully functioning demo, but only pumps out lo rez animations. But the effects are stunning and you have complete control over every aspect of the effect. Unfortunately, they're asking a rediculous amount for it ($400 USD). If I had the bucks I'd buy it. Sorry can't remember the link.

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File received and all is well...Thank you for your donation of talent and time. Richard

I personally like the Maya water as well...the render took over half an hour though? what were your settings??

the above was just the "canned" Maya ocean "high seas"...so no tweaking of attributes or anything like that...render time about 3 mins 30 secs

...nice fire by the way

Message edited on: 01/07/2005 04:08

Awesome water, Innovater! I fear I'm just not optimizing Maya correctly, or something. I know it looks more realistic, but not as colorful as the Brycean water mess I made. I'm interested in knowing how you made that image, my Maya water was a NURBS plane tweaked a bit, with the Render Globals set pretty high... I tried many previous passes, and the one in this thread is the best I could do. I can't remember if I was using GI or FG, but I believe I was using Mental Ray?

there was nothing to making the image above...and i litereally mean nothing. It is the default maya ocean shader called high seas and you dont even need to apply it to geometry...Maya does that for you :-) just drag and drop into viewport and viola! instant water. for that render, i litereally changed nothing...you can get far more realistic results if you play around with the attributes that maya offers for there fluids. the first render is maya software without raytracing...the second render is with raytracing turned on (obviously a different ocean sahder as well). The cool thing about this last ocean shader is it is automatically animated. All you have to do is push the play button and it is realitically animated (you can change all of the animation attributes as well)...I may render a small clip out later to show you if you would like.

Attached Link: http://mgriffey.rex3d.net/ocean1.mov

here is a small 2 sec animation setup time: 2mins render time: 1hr 8mins total (for 50 frames)

Innovator, that is simply amazing...! I really think I'm going about water the wrong way in Maya. Perhaps you'd email me the .mb file sometime? I'd really like to know what I'm doing wrong. Are you saying there's no need for Mental Ray when rendering those images and that movie?

Yep, Innovator. I've playe around in Maya for about ten hours and come up with nothing in the way of water, in which you speak. It leads me to believe one of two things : 1. I'm inept. 2. You're a charlatan, and merely filmed water moving and called it Maya work. Note : these two possibilities are in cubic descending order of probability.

lol well what version of maya do you use? cause the ocean shaders/fluid effects are not available on all versions. Here at my school we use Maya 5 unlimited...well soon to be Maya6. But the ocean stuff is rather new to Maya. and yea, i can send the Maya file if youd like...but if you have an older version, it wont work

oh and sorry....no need for mental ray for those renders...in fact i turned off raytracing for the animation which doesnt change the look at all unless you need to see reflections in the water

Innovator, I am using Maya 6 Unlimited. It does have Ocean Shaders and whatnot, although I couldn't find the "High Seas" shader anywhere. I'm having a rough time with Maya, it's not finding my third mouse button, which every other program and even every game has no problem finding. SO I can't use Hypershade hardly at all, and there is no drag-and-drop functionality without the third, middle mouse button available. I would love the scene file! My email is my name @ yahoo.com. I will not plagiarize you with it, just study it and figure out how the Ocean shaders work...!

that really sucks about the third button on the mouse thingy. I would say either uninstall/reinstall Maya or you can customize your key and mouse configurations. The middle mouse button is pretty important since that is how you navigate around the viewport. Although it is not needed for the Ocean example...you can simply right click and choose import "oceanshader.ma" into scene or whatever it says. But, I have sent you the maya binary file (mb) to your email. And feel free to plagarize...I honestly did nothing original with it. So have fun working with it. Let me know if you have any questions

I've re-installed my mouse drivers, and the mouse button is mapped to the correct button. It's a Maya thing. I'll re-install it, and see what happens...

Alas, Innovator, I couldn't get Maya to open your file. It said it was the wrong file size? I thought it might be a version discrepancy, but no matter what I tried I couldn't get the file to open... I'm frustrated with Maya a bit, but I'm not gonna let it stop me from figuring out how to use it better.