object/boat on top of fluid

to animate!

With some help at DAZ forum I think I came up with a solution on how to get a boat to float in water, and have water interact with boat:

The key thing is to get an object like a sphere to interact with the fluid using the physics engine. Considering they are both meshes it shouldn’t be impossible. For a boat there should be about 3-5 spheres, each sphere controlling either the nose, the side or the back of the boat, I think using armatures it will be possible to get the boat to move not at the exact moment of a wave, but with some delay like in real life, it will be even possible for the boat to gain velocity and jump a bit out of water, because of the settings in the physics engine and size of the wave and it’s speed. Then, we can either delete the fluid or make it invisible as long as the motion data remains. Then we set the boat to obstacle and recalculate the fluid again. This time the boat has the motion relative to the fluid, and the fluid will react to how the object is moving, giving us realistic wave splashed with minimum work. :smiley:

Now, my skills are not that good, so could someone please explain to me why I am a fool and why this will never work! And if not, could someone please give it a try!!! :ba:

Can’t say that this will help you, but there is a plugin for Max/Maya that can emulate that behaviour. Maybe you can get some ideas from watching the video 4th from the bottom at Craft Animations.

Thanks, but thats not really helping. I just need someone to check my theory.