I’m creating an animation of a guy rowing a boat - I’ve got the stage of adding the sea, only the mesh goes straight throught the boat mesh, as a result the sea is present inside the boat, which is obviously not what I want. Does anyone know of any ways of preventing this?
Thanks for any help.
OR put your camera close to the water so that the side of the boat hides the water in the boat.
I’ve been trying to avoid learning compositing as it looks complicated and my deadline is looming… one for the future though. For now I’ll have to go for the easy option and move the water below the boat for the interior shots…
Thanks for the suggestions guys 
You could add a black-and-white image texture shaped like the boat’s waterline and map it to alpha to make a boat-shaped “hole” in the water. Map the image texture to the boat’s position (Map Input, Object, enter the boat object’s name) so it follows the boat around.
I think the compositing solution would probably be easiest.
2.43 has displace modifiers that do what he wants.
CD38: I’m with you, for a technically correct solution. good idea.
Try using the Blender 2.42’s fluid simulation system. You could probably put fluid in the areas where the boat sails. It will take a long time but it should work.
Hi !
CD38 is right ! The best and simple method seems using the real displacement feature of the V 2.43.
Here is a trial done with this feature :
http://3d-synthesis.com/movies/Crazy_Boat_MPEG2.mpg
http://3d-synthesis.com/movies/Crazy_Boat_DiVX6.avi
(rendered in 62 hours on Intel P4 -3 GHz 2GB Ram).
A Greyscale picture is used as displacement mask . The shape of the boat is black for the water hole around the boat. The procedural texture of the waves is moved by an empty.
This texture is also animated in depth by a Z offset in the Material Ipo.
The see level is grey 128, the waves around and on the front side are drawn as a white shape.
The bubbles are on a secondary mesh, more subdivided than the sea, animated using the boat propeller as reference object.
It has been done quickly, and the water could be improved a lot. I really have to study COG tutorials… He has done the best seascapes I have ever seen !
Philippe.
Everything’s simple, once you know how to do it 
(Not that I do 
)
Yikes ! Did you say 62 HOURS ? For 10 seconds (250 frames) of animation ? :eek: So ~15 minutes / frame ?
I thought that the procedural texture (“COG”) method is faster than using the fluid simulator (there’s no fluid simulator used here … right ?)
There’s a lot of technical “stuff” there, can you post the blend file?
I’m particularly interested in seeing how you did the bubbles around the front and back.
Do you have any ideas on how the bubbles, especially the ones in back, could be made to follow a “wave” / boat wake pattern (more or less an expanding triangular shape) ?
Mike
Yes, there is no fluid simulation here, only true displacement.
The long render time is due to the real time displacement,and also it is rendered with raytracing to allow the sky reflecting on the water.
Well, the Blend file is not on this computer.
The bubbles are just made with a second mesh divided in 2 V shapes (one in front and oneon the rear of the boat), highly subdivided with subsurf level 1.
A procedural texture (mix of Cloud and musgrave if I remember well) is applied with full transparency (alpha=0= and high specularity. This mesh and the boat share the same parent (Empty). Its texture is animated in displacement by using the propeller as reference.
The propeller is not visible through the water, but it is here, parented to the boat engine, and it rotates.
When rotating, the propeller moves the texture (Clouds and some other procedural textures are 3D textures, so if you displace them in space, you deform the pattern, and also the mesh if the displace modifer is used.
Do you have any ideas on how the bubbles, especially the ones in back, could be made to follow a “wave” / boat wake pattern (more or less an expanding triangular shape) ?
I think that we could improve a lot the method by using an other animated texture with Blend and Alpha. The texture could be a greyscale drawing made of several V shapes. The material could be moved along the mesh axis using an offset Ipo, and the texture could naturally enlarge itself if we use the TexMesh field in the mesh panel. If I remember well, we have to write in this field the name of the mesh, and the texture will follow the shape and dimensions of the mesh.
I think that the bubbles mesh could also be linked to the Sea mesh using some hooks and vertex parenting. this way, the sea mesh would deform the bubbles mesh in a more realistic way… But many hooks could slow down the computation…
Is it understandable ?
I forgot something: The boat should have a double hull, to avoid some waves being seen through the external hull, because it is almost impossible to have a perfect matching between the waves and the boat volume.
Philippe.