About LI Elemental Dynamics - Sand and Water

Martial

Allo

I have bought this product Is it a mnual or some tutorial about using it? What about using the sphere or the preset ? even if i use the scene when i include sonme other objet the rendering is blck  or i cannt see the objet (ex a ship om the top of waves)

Thanks

columbine

I bought this yesterday and hadn't played with it yet, so I took a few minutes to look around and make a couple of demos.

The short answer, though, if you don't want to read the rest of this, is that you don't really need a manual, and if you've got objects that aren't showing up, something may be wrong.

The product is not much more than two planes whose surface shapes can be altered easily via sliders. The "sand" plane and the "water" plane use exactly the same set of custom sliders; the only difference between the two is their surface materials. This produces some interesting effects because, for example, the "Sanctuary Cove" slider, meant for the sand plane (to create a cove, yes) makes a very large, potentially ship-capsizing wavefront when you use it on the water plane.

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In the first test image I have: 1) loaded a sand plane 2) loaded a water plane above it 3) set the water plane to use the Sanctuary Cove shape 4) put the scene in Sun-Sky mode 5) positioned the sun, via rotate dome, to where it would do the most good 6) loaded a swimming figure. That's all. No other lights, no HDRI backdrop. (That's not some kind of crazy distortion on her calves and ankles--she has fins.)

I didn't cut off this render--it went to 5000 iterations and finished. I'm not altogether happy with the look of the sand, but some of that is the low light level "underwater." You'll notice the figure's too dark too; not enough light on her. This is a common problem with underwater renders.

Notice also that there's not actually a lot of space between the water and sand planes here. In fact her right foot's nearly touching the water plane. She is swimming through "air"! There is nothing at all but her between the two planes in this image.

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In the second test image I haven't changed the two planes at all. I've moved up to the surface of the water and added Small Fishing Boat. Here, if I hadn't changed it, we'd have an empty-alpha "sky" so I added one of Sedor's Iray Skies (which means I also took the render out of Sun-Sky mode). Notice the gold color in the foreground under the water. That's the sand surface. In practice, if I were doing a scene like this I'd move the sand deeper/further away from the water so it didn't show through as much. The boat's actually in danger of going aground, the water's so shallow there. This render, too, is a bit grainy on the water surface after hitting its 5000-iteration stop. I can't tell if it wants more light or that's just the way the water looks with the sand so close under it.

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I tried a couple of the presets. They don't do much more than I did. For example, the Sunset Ridge preset ... loads a sand plane, a water plane, an emissive sphere off-camera (this is to help deal with that same not-enough-light-underwater problem), and a non-emissive sphere on camera just to give you something to look at. It looks very, very similar to my first test image, actually, just with more light underwater. And the special render settings the scene loads aren't much; they just throw it into Sun-Sky and add some horizon haze.

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In short (too late!) it's a good kit but there's less here than meets the eye, and if you've got objects not showing up, I don't know what to tell you. If you can't see a figure underwater, it may be that it's just too dark, or that you didn't put her all the way below the water plane ... but if you can't see an object on TOP of the water, I feel like that's gotta be something blatantly going wrong.

Ninefold

I've been thinking about buying this and really appreciate your post, columbine! Very informative.

Martial

Thanks Columbine