What is the best way to tackle the following problem with Maya and RealFlow:
I have a dog and an ocean. The dog jumps into the ocean and the water needs to push the dog around, but also the dog needs to splash up water. Do I animate the dog's actions and movement and then place this in a RealFlow water element or is there a way to animate the dog's body movements, but not X/Y axis movements in the body of water, and have the water element force him back and forth?
depends on how much computation time you have to do / set up the simulation. And how you want to control things.
Ingeneral its a tradeoff if you want perfect simulation you cant really get any animation done right. So i think its WAY easier for animators to get a convincing look if they animate the buoyancy themselves.
QUOTE(Joojaa @ 12/31/08, 08:50 AM) [snapback]297918[/snapback] depends on how much computation time you have to do / set up the simulation. And how you want to control things.
Ingeneral its a tradeoff if you want perfect simulation you cant really get any animation done right. So i think its WAY easier for animators to get a convincing look if they animate the buoyancy themselves.
What sort of workflow would you use? Use a dummy object to generate the water surface then animate the character and his buoyancy? Or do his animation first and have the water react as such?
Animation first, after all your not after what is right but what looks best. If not then im afraid yu would need to simulate the dog too, because a swimming dog works on the feedback form water.