Experiment 1: Using free form deformation to animate water

In order to decide which modifier or modifiers were best I carried out some simple experiments using different modifiers. The first experiment was with free form deformations in the form of box deformation. Firstly I created a plane object then added a free form deformation box modifier to the plane. The box deformation allows the user to adjust the amount of control points for the object. I created a plane that was 10 x 10 and added 10 x 10 control points onto it. Leaving 2 control points in the y direction as that was the minimum that was allowed to be done.

 With the control points made I then started moving the them into place to try and recreate chunky ripples in water. This was a long process as I needed to move each control point individually. I generally went with every second point down and the other one up.

With the model made next step was to animate the water. To do this I had to animate each control point and key frame it. This as you can imagine was a lengthy process even just to make one movement to test it out to see how it looked. I added a water texture to the image which I made to see how the animation looked using mental ray. After one sequence I found that some stretching was occurring during frames which was not ideal for the animation. From the short render you can tell that the animation isn't very effective especially with the time taken to do it. If I were to do another couple of sequences the time it would take to make another one would not have worth it. The results from this experiment is that I should not use free form deformation to animate the water for our game.