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.

Researching deformation modifiers to make a water animation

For my college project I was tasked with creating a symposium research topic for an advanced 3d concept. For my project I decided to investigate deformations and how they could be used to model and animate water. The reason I am making water is for my final year project which requires my team to make a game based on the theme of well being enhanced technology. Our game is called Haven. In this game you play as yourself and you have have to complete a serious tasks which involve interacting with animals in our game. The point of this interaction is to try engage empathy with player and get an emotional response back from playing. The idea is that the player will be playing the game in a therapy session alongside a therapist who can make evaluations of the players activities. We have chosen to use a poly style art for our art style. This is child friendly and appeals to all audiences. For this reason I needed to model and animate poly water and I have chosen to do so using deformation modifiers. Deformations have been used for animation before with great success but I haven't found much people who tried to use them for water. I will be looking at various deformation modifiers: Free form deformation, patch deformation, noise, wave and ripple. Since I am a mainly a computer programmer and a student I have limited knowledge and experience in animation. I will be looking at which techniques I personally found best making the water and animating it for my work.