This week I finished the main ‘spaceship floating’ and ‘spaceship driving over the ocean’ animations.

Firstly, I need to disturb the velocity layer of the spaceship by adding a lot of noise, which will help create more waves.

In the meantime, I need to make the direction of water diffusion to be realised with pointvop

I created the disturbance layer by adding turbnoise and then adjusting the parameters

This velocity layer is then separated out into particles, the purpose of this step is to produce different levels of waves

After the particle simulation is done, the flat tank node in houdini is used to generate the splash and convert the particles to mesh.

This was a very tough step and I spent a lot of time on it. Because I could never control the parameters of the splash and the disturbance layer, sometimes the splash would fly very high which is not feasible and not realistic. So I need to be precise with every parameter to achieve the perfect state.

After generating the waves, I need to generate some white foam (in houdini it’s called the white water tool holder)

To make the waves look more realistic, I separated some particles into mesh so that they can be used as some small water droplets.

I will render the waves and bubbles in layers and finally composite them in nuke for better handling and a more realistic look.

Next week I’m going to make the mapping and lighting for the spaceship, as well as the simulation of the trailing smoke inside the houdini. And I will start making my cave scene in ue5.