iREAL Animated Ocean Water System in Carrara

PhilW

I was immediately impressed by the look of ThePhilosopher's iREAL Animated Ocean Water System when it was released a few months ago. However it was for Daz Studio only and required AniMate2 which I did not have.  However I recently got AniMate2 for a project that I was doing for someone, and when the iREAL Ocean was on sale recently, I decided to snap it up.

I have spent half a day today seeing if I could get it to work in Carrara - and I have succeeded so I thought that I would share how I did it in case there are others who would be interested in having this work in Carrara - it really takes animated water to the next level.

1 - Load one of the four waters into Daz Studio

2 - Load and apply the matching AniBlock to the water

3 - Right click in the AniMate box and select Covert AniBlock to Timeline keyframes, select OK to the popup box.

4 - File > Save As > Support Asset > Figure/Prop Assets... - you can use the default settings for this

5 - Open a blank medium sized scene in Carrara, set the frame rate to 30 and the preferences tweener to Linear

6 - Import the saved Ocean prop - you should have it appear in Carrara, it is the correct size and the morphs are there but not activated yet.

7 - You can delete the key frames for translation and rotation as they don't appear to do anything.  Now select the Ocean and go to Menu/Animation/Create Animation Group

8 - Load and apply the attached NLA Clip - this basically turns on and then off each morph in sequence over a 4 second timeframe, and I have included it to save you doing this manually (which is what I needed to do 120 times!).  The same clip works for all four Oceans once they have been imported.

9 - You will need to add a plane underneath the waves for the seafloor, and apply ThePhilosopher's textures to it, and edit your materials, but the difficult bit of getting the animated waves into Carrara is done!

I hope this is useful. Once I have worked on the textures a bit more, I will look at rendering an animation so that you can see it in action.

Dartanbeck

So the DUF version won't just load into Carrara?

I was thinking that the aniBlock importer would work to use his aniBlocks directly in Carrara.

PhilW

Dartanbeck said:

So the DUF version won't just load into Carrara?

I was thinking that the aniBlock importer would work to use his aniBlocks directly in Carrara.

Yes, I tried that first but the standard DUF version did not seem to have the morphs included, so the AniBlock did not work.  Maybe it would have worked once I got the version across which included the morphs - perhaps could have saved myself an hour or two of work! Anyway, I have a working version now which I am happy about.

Dartanbeck

Looks like a cool system - it it seems like it would be easier to work with in Carrara than in Studio - but that was my initial impression when I watched his tutorial. In Carrara we could just add a replicator instead of having to load in new versions of the whole thing. Looks really cool, and I've been liking the stuff I've seen from him since, too! 

PhilW

Here is an example video now that I have set up the textures as well - all rendered natively in Carrara. I am impressed with this product.

Samuel S.

Nice, it looks realistic even with ship and character.

UnifiedBrain

Excellent, Phil!  Thanks for sharing this.  Loved the swimmer.  Now I have even more to be excited about when I get to animation.

ProPose

I bought that product back in September, thinking to myself, "that's got to work in Carrara!!".  I tried and failed, so Thanks for this Phil!

Samuel S.

Is it possible to upload HD version as well?

mhscspo

Phil, could you please explain how you were able to get the boats to interact with the ocean, this is very interesting!!

PhilW

The smaller inflatable boat I hand animated to match the movement of the waves, basically putting it as low down as possible without the water showing throught the bottom. I initially set keys every second (all the water movements are 4 sec loops) and then needed to add a couple more to fine tune.  The larger boat is just a rocking motion with keys at zero and two seconds and then copy the zero frame keys to four seconds so that it all looped.

The ball was not 100% successful, but that uses a second ball which uses Sparrowhawke's Pin modifier to link it to the movement of the master ocean (which you can't see).  I then parented the ball in the render to that other ball, but as the position wasn't identical on the replicated ocean to the original, the movement didn't work quite so well - it would have been better had I not been in a hurry!

mhscspo

PhilW said:

The smaller inflatable boat I hand animated to match the movement of the waves, basically putting it as low down as possible without the water showing throught the bottom. I initially set keys every second (all the water movements are 4 sec loops) and then needed to add a couple more to fine tune.  The larger boat is just a rocking motion with keys at zero and two seconds and then copy the zero frame keys to four seconds so that it all looped.

The ball was not 100% successful, but that uses a second ball which uses Sparrowhawke's Pin modifier to link it to the movement of the master ocean (which you can't see).  I then parented the ball in the render to that other ball, but as the position wasn't identical on the replicated ocean to the original, the movement didn't work quite so well - it would have been better had I not been in a hurry!

thanks

PhilW

mhscspo said:

PhilW said:

The smaller inflatable boat I hand animated to match the movement of the waves, basically putting it as low down as possible without the water showing throught the bottom. I initially set keys every second (all the water movements are 4 sec loops) and then needed to add a couple more to fine tune.  The larger boat is just a rocking motion with keys at zero and two seconds and then copy the zero frame keys to four seconds so that it all looped.

The ball was not 100% successful, but that uses a second ball which uses Sparrowhawke's Pin modifier to link it to the movement of the master ocean (which you can't see).  I then parented the ball in the render to that other ball, but as the position wasn't identical on the replicated ocean to the original, the movement didn't work quite so well - it would have been better had I not been in a hurry!

thanks

Generally, using the Pin modifier works well and I can recommend it as a quick way to have one object follow the animated surface of another - it also works great for attaching buttons to animated cloth for example.  And it is free fromSparrowhawke3D, so there's no excuse!

mhscspo

PhilW said:

mhscspo said:

PhilW said:

The smaller inflatable boat I hand animated to match the movement of the waves, basically putting it as low down as possible without the water showing throught the bottom. I initially set keys every second (all the water movements are 4 sec loops) and then needed to add a couple more to fine tune.  The larger boat is just a rocking motion with keys at zero and two seconds and then copy the zero frame keys to four seconds so that it all looped.

The ball was not 100% successful, but that uses a second ball which uses Sparrowhawke's Pin modifier to link it to the movement of the master ocean (which you can't see).  I then parented the ball in the render to that other ball, but as the position wasn't identical on the replicated ocean to the original, the movement didn't work quite so well - it would have been better had I not been in a hurry!

thanks

Generally, using the Pin modifier works well and I can recommend it as a quick way to have one object follow the animated surface of another - it also works great for attaching buttons to animated cloth for example.  And it is free fromSparrowhawke3D, so there's no excuse!

thanks again, I downloaded the pin modifier today, and by the way Phil, I along with another Carrara user who has that animated ocean water was trying to follow your instructions in your first post steps 3 and 4 in his Daz studio 4 when we right clicked on the animate box it said "bake to studio keyframes" I take it that's the same as converting and in step 4 there were two different places to save the files, and after importing the .duf file into Carrara an error message said that iREAL_Ocean_000000.dsf couldn't be found. We tried about two or three times and couldn't get it into Carrara, I'm going to hold off getting this for myself for now as I'm not a frequent studio user.

 

PhilW

I'm also not a frequent DS user - yes, "Bake to Studio Keyframes" is what I meant.  When I saved the duf file I just set up a new folder under my Documents folder, not saved into the "My Daz 3D Library" structure. Not sure that will make a difference or not.

mhscspo

PhilW said:

I'm also not a frequent DS user - yes, "Bake to Studio Keyframes" is what I meant.  When I saved the duf file I just set up a new folder under my Documents folder, not saved into the "My Daz 3D Library" structure. Not sure that will make a difference or not.

Thanks PhilW, we got it going for now, the only small thing that I saw was the "rolling-ocean" has a small glitch just about at the end of the animation all of the other oceans were just fine

PhilW said:

I'm also not a frequent DS user - yes, "Bake to Studio Keyframes" is what I meant.  When I saved the duf file I just set up a new folder under my Documents folder, not saved into the "My Daz 3D Library" structure. Not sure that will make a difference or not.

Thanks PhilW, we finally got things to work, the only small thing is that one of the oceans "rolling-ocean" for some reason has a glitch toward the end of the animation, but all of the other ones were just fine

mhscspo

Thanks PhilW, we finally got things to work for now.

PhilW

ThePhilosopher has given me permission to share my take on the materials for his iREAL Ocean set, converted to Carrara shaders.  The ones labelled "Floor" are (surprise suprprise!) for the floor, the others being for the water - I decided to do it that way rather than create sub-folders. As the waters are transparent, the final appearance is influenced by both of these, giving a wide range of looks.  The textures themselves are not included, they are externally referenced, so you will probably need to tell Carrara where they are the first time they are used, and then resave the shaders for your own folder organisation. And of course this means that you have to own the actual set!  I have added a couple of new variations too which aren't in the original version.

I did consider setting a low tiling value on the floor textures but left them as they are to match the originals.  It is something that you might want to consider on a shot by shot basis.