DynaWave User Manual

Tutorial 2: Wind and adjusting parameters
Let's bring up the water object we created in the previous tutorial (load Tut2.scn if you don't have one). This time we are going to first play with the wind source and its parameters. Load DynaWave and press the Select Water Surface button. Now go to the Wind panel and press the Get/Make Source button. A new wind source object will appear on the scene. Move the wind object outside the water surface. Right click on the Record Button in the trueSpace interface and uncheck the Autorecord box. This will prevent the wind source from being keyframed as you move it around while the simulation is playing. Now just press the Start Button and watch. You can move the Wind Object around as you would move any object in trueSpace while the simulation is running. Try it, and watch how the wind driven waves change in real time. If the simulation stops press Start again. You can set the End frame to a number higher than 100 so you have more time to experiment. If you want you can uncheck the Record Keys box so that the vertex animation is not recorded and you spare some memory. Lets now play with the wind parameters. If you resize the wind source in the Z axis, the amplitude of the wind displacement changes. The taller the wind source, the larger the wave amplitude. If you resize the wind source in the X,Y axes, the wind displacement changes velocity. You can even key-frame the size of the wind source to animate changes in the wind displacement, both in amplitude and velocity. In a similar way to the effectors, you can toggle the visibility of the wind source by using the appropriate buttons. Unchecking the box will turn off the wind. If you need to animate this parameter you will have to do it by scaling down the wind source in the Z axis. The Scale parameter sets the size of the wind displacements. Larger scales will have finer detail. The time scale is just a factor that speeds up or down the propagation of the wind displacement. Adjust this parameter if your wind source is too small or too large to achieve the displacement velocity you require. The Octaves parameter adjust the noise field. There are several types of noise fields you can choose from. Each has a particular look. Experiment with them until you get what you want. The sharp style will make the wind displacement have a spiky look. Usually the sharp style looks more water-like. Unchecking the box will soften or round the waves as you can see below. Inverting the displacement will make a negative version of the waves. Usually the invert parameter will produce water-like looks (compare the un-inverted image below with the original sharp and inverted one). Of course not everything you simulate with DynaWave will be water, so you have the flexibility to adjust the look to suit your needs.

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Copyright 1998-2000 by Alain Bellon. All rights reserved.