[Bf-committers] Help needed (contract work) for ocean simulation in blender

[Matt Ebb]

Hi all,

The studio I work for ( ProMotion Studios [1]) has just started
pre-production on an animation project, to be done in Blender, that
will involve shots of an ocean, waves, and spray. Crashing waves and
spray can probably be faked a lot with particles etc, but there
doesn't exist a good solution at the present for simulating bodies of
water such as a choppy ocean.

We need to get something working within the next month, and are able
to sponsor development in this area, for a solution that's usable now
and in the future in Blender. Ideally, we would like a procedural
texture and/or modifer, integrated within Blender. I'd like to avoid
custom python things that involve too much setup/external modules/etc
since it will make my life a lot more complicated getting it all set
up on a render farm.

I've written up a more detailed wiki page here, so anyone who's
interested, please give it a read:
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/BlenderDev/OceanTools

In summary, a very promising direction seems to be using a simple
standalone python script [2] that's a part of the GPL Houdini Ocean
Toolkit [3], and converting it over to integrate with Blender. I'm
able to help working on this on the Blender integration side, however
it's not worth my time learning about things like FFTs in the core
code, if there are people out there who can do it much more quickly
and easily.

If anyone is interested in helping with this, it would be most
appreciated - please contact me directly via email and we can discuss
rates and budgets. I'd be very happy to discuss this work as soon as
possible. I'm also 'broken_work' usually in #blendercoders in
Australian business hours.

cheers and thanks,

Matt


[1] http://www.promotionstudios.com
[2] http://www.promotionstudios.com/files/ocean/ocean.py
[3] http://odforce.net/wiki/index.php/HoudiniOceanToolkit


(PS. Please don't suggest tutorials using clouds textures etc in
Blender, I've seen a lot of them and they aren't at the level of
quality we need).