Testing Ripples Python Script
May 29th, 2009 by admin
Here’s a ripple effect I’m working on for a project:
It’s actually just an image filter! You render your water and objects from directly overhead into a sequence of images. Make the water shadeless white and the objects shadeless black. I’ve written a little image processing Python script that uses that image sequence as input and generates the ripples into a new image sequence. That sequence is then used as either a displacement map or bump map for the water back in the original .BLEND file.
There’s a lot of tweaking to do, but this was just a proof of concept.
NOTE: This isn’t a Python script that runs within Blender, although I suppose it could. It’s just a command line program. I’ll post it when it’s finished.
Wow, that’s nice! Maybe with some modifications, this would also be excellent for
- creating waterflow effects around stationary objects in flowing water
- shoreline effects
- large waves (minus the necessary particle effects).
It might be interesting to see if the image sequence could be used to drive a particles system for adding foam and spray elements (e.g. – a speedboat).
I look forward to checking it out, thanks!
Great idea! It’s always cool seeing ‘cheaper’ tricks like this to eliminate the overhead associated with physical sims (and getting them to behave).
Does this use some fairly-standard py image libs, or is it more of a home-brew system?