Animating a breaking wave (rig)

shardy

I am needing to animate a breaking ocean wave and am wondering if anyone has any experience or ideas to best setup a rig to do this.

I have successfully generated a wave animated with morph animation that works extremely well, however the engine it is planned to go in only officially supports Bones-based animation so I am wanting to play around with a contingency wave incase the morphs don't work out.

Has anyone got any ideas for setting this up? I have played with some different setups but haven't been able to replicate the 'barrel' feel of the wave too well (cant seem to get a nice curve over itself with bones)

Thanks

Mark Dygert

Have any examples of the types of waves you want to create?
Are we talking white caps or smaller rolling waves?
Can you use particles at all?
How close does the player/camera get to the waves and at what angle?
Do the waves need to interact with anything other than themselves?
Does it need to loop?
Do the bones need to be a linked chain or can you have a bunch of bones that move independently from one another?

Off the top of my head I would say use a method like this to record your morph and translate it to bone based animation.
http://boards.polycount.net/showthread.php?p=1021761#post1021761

Basically you create control points that follow you're original mesh as it animates they just ride along. You create a second final mesh that is skinned to bones/dummies that follow those control points. As the original mesh animates you set keys for the bones. When you're all done you export just the bones and the skinned mesh.

shardy

Hey Vig thanks for the input. Definitely rolling waves, but will need to barrel and then break on the surface (think surfing)

Particles for sure

Player will be on the wave

At this stage the wave will be isolated from anything else (apart from sitting in the ocean) but will roll in break and flatten back out rinse and repeat.

I guess it loops in that it appears from flat into wave back into flat

Can have bones that move independently from one another

Thanks for the link I will check it out now

arrangemonk

since your engine should support shaders, you could make some sort of terrain with animated displacement map, with like 2 iterations 1. basic shape(heightmap), 2. displacement(normal oriented)
then make few frames for both and blend them together over time or something

its a rough theory though

commander_keen

Why not just replicate the vertex animation with bones? An animated model that moves forward and left or right (with texture scrolling to hide the movement) should work fine. There are quite a few surfing games, take a look at those.