Water Surface Tension
Although its been a lean month for ‘Cog’ developments, due to paid work and the desire to step back and recharge my batteries, I have done some experimentation into surface tension on water. It has always bugged me when I see objects in CG water with no reaction i.e. surface tension. Tiny details like that can help create reality no matter what style the image or animation is rendered in. Whereas if these small details are missing even the best photo-reality render will be unconvincing.
The above image and the associated movies on my site were produced using the inbuilt procedural textures and raytrace renderer. The surface tension effect is a blurred white rectangle mapped to the pilling object and added as a displacement map. Adjusting the amount of displacement, and varying the size in the mapto panel, to produce just the right amount of surface tension effect. The image needs to be quite large (mine is 2048 x 2048) to give a gradual curl up the sides of the pilling. If the image were too small it would produce a step like effect, because the pixels would be too large.
Visit www.cogfilms.com where you will find two animations with the effect in motion.
For those who prefer direct links:-
water-surface-tension-cyclic_640x360.mov (QT 2.2Mb)
water-surface-tension-cyclic_320x180.mov (QT 1.1Mb)
Enjoy.
Cog