Here is a pretty good tutorial on using particle systems with billboards and how to offset animations on them. http://vimeo.com/1412840
Hope that helps.
Would you mind sharing your settings for the particle system for your splashes as I have a ocean scene where I want to add splashes too.
Exactly, I can´t see them either. Is not needed to have a minimum amount of voters to gain stars?
Btw, the splashes are looking good as well.
I see them.
Te progress is really great. I am looking for new updates.
Ok, now I see them too
Hey, I see the stars now ! weeee
Thanks for the link musk, but I’m not sure that approach is too convenient… having 75 frames of 300x300 pixels packed in a big checkboard image texture (maybe 8x9 elements) sounds like a big big image, and I need at least 4 of them, the sequence approach in the other hand should release memory every time a frame is loaded and rendered…
When I was speaking of billboards I meant manually made ones, not particle generated ones. I could use lower res but then I’d be sacrificing quality…
Anyway thanks again for the feedback !
Time for an update.
I’m still struggling to get the splashes nicely composited. Not worthy looking at them right now, but I also worked on the ocean. Added the modifiers animation, plus some SSS to get some nice green tones on the higher waves. Changed a little bit the composition so it respects a little more the “thirds rule”.
I boosted specs and other details. It looks now more like what I meant in the concept, so happiness is all around 
Hopefully next update is final… damn splashes :o
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looks very nice. though for a bit of c&c, imho, there should be some spray behind and infront of the rock island because of the disturbance of flow it theoreticly should create.
5*!
Thanks radialronnie, yes, the sprays are coming, just need some spare time… Anyway, here some particle made splashes…
To avoid all kind of problems I had compositing the billboards (due to the lack of alpha texture support for masking in renderlayers) I decided to bring the main geometry into a particle scene, and render all the particle systems properly masked there. It worked nicely. I then added some textures in compositor to give proper shading as it turned out the one from the Halo shader looked horrible…
Anyway, almost there…
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Oh man this is looking great!! Keep it up!!
This is looking excellent, malefico! There’s a great sense of turbulent motion, and the lighthouse standing as an immutable bastion just emphasizes that feeling. It seems to me that your intent was to “paint with light” rather than just model and illuminate, and it works very well in that regard.
Not convinced entirely by your reason why it isn’t lit, it looks a little incomplete to me because that’s missing, but it’s not a killer omission.
This is one of the best things I’ve seen in awhile. 3d that almost looks like a painting always makes me smile. I showed it to one of my buddies and he was wondering how long rendering time is.
This is really nice, give you five stars
++
Brilliant, love the modelling. How did you do the water?
Just a minor (or perhaps major) issue, the splashes around the lighthouse, they could probably be a bit larger, also the area of sea around the splashes could be made a bit more turbulent, more swirling around the lighthouse rock. Right now it looks like the splashes got just stuck on top of the water, while the water itself just keeps on running its merry way as if there isn’t a great big rock in the way.
The splashes around the lighthouse would continue to fall down the waterfall because they would be constantly created due to the perpetual motion of water.
The Epic seems to be good maybe even better almost god like. Maybe some light would add a better look to the darkness within the sight.
any progress? If you call this amazing piece of art finished, I REALLY would enjoy having one for my desktop 
It is beautiful!!
Hey guys, sorry for the lack of updates, I have been very busy lately inlcuding b-conf…
So, I started animating this piece and it is taking me a lot of work. So far I have the modifiers and materials/textures animated. Still I haven’t added the splashes and particle fx, it’s going to take some time to synchronize everything…
here is a 2 seconds clip of what I got so far…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DwWzU_3cSM8 (YouTube version)
and the original (half-res) with slightly better quality…
http://www.malefico3d.org/wip/faro/waterfall-lighthouse.mp4
As you can see there are some oddities to be work on, like the black areas (mesh intersections), or the bendy water… but at least itś animated now, and I optimized render times, so I am getting 7.5 minutes a frame at HD resolution… instead of the original 18 mins !
More to come… hopefully.
Thanks for all the feedback !
malefico.
The clouds need some motion, perhaps make them 2D sprites and animate them somehow.
Maybe the camera needs a bit of motion too. Something like going slightly up and right… And i suppose that you’ll include some of the splashes on the rock, dont’you? Pleeeeeeeaseee!!!