How to make a Ship Wake in Blender | Tutorial

about one year ago I made this World War II animation in blender since a lot of people ask me how I made the ship wake I thought I'd make a specific video about that the good thing about this method is that you don't need to simulate anything it's fairly easy to do and does not really add to the render time unfortunately though this method also has some major limitations which you will see at the end for this work you need to find some good stock footage of a ship wake ideally the camera should look from above and there shouldn't be many bright highlights visible when you have found a clip that works loaded into DaVinci Resolve and go to the fusion tab add a planar tracker and set the reference time while on the first frame change the tracker to hybrid Point motion type to translation and then Mark a high contrast area on the boat to track with that done set the operation mode to stabilize which will do exactly that stabilize the shot so that the boat does not move you can now add a transform node to get rid of all the unnecessary space if the camera or boat is rotating in the clip you can either go back to the planar tracker and set the motion type to translation and rotation or you can just quickly add some keyframes to the angle slider in the transform load next up add a color corrector and take out all the saturation then play around with the other sliders to isolate the White Water with that done added black background and merge it with the rest foreign polygon mask around the boat and wake and use that mask for the merge node invert it and soften the edge a bit now export your footage into an image sequence in blender I have my ship moving in a straight line with a constant speed on an ocean surface to add the Wake we need to go into the ocean material and import our image sequence we just made add enough frames and with the note bringer at an active press Ctrl T to add a texture coordinate and mapping note create an empty pick it in the texture coordinate node and set it to object now scale your empty to the size you need and place the Wake underneath the ship to have it in the center of the empty add 0.5 to the X and Y location of the mapping node when you are happy parent it to the ship in your Ocean material add the diffuse Shader and mix it with the ocean Shader then use the image sequence as the mix Factor you can also plug it into a bump node to make it look less for that in many cases this might already be enough but if you are seeing the ship from behind fairly close you might want to add some more depth to the wake for this add a plane and place it at the back of the ship slightly underwater subdivided a bunch then sculpt up one or two little triangles depending on how many engines your ship has turned it to the ship and then add a displaced modifier set it to object and add a new empty then go to the texture Tab and add a Cloud's texture make sure the empty is selected in the modifier and then scale it to change the frequency of the bumps if the Foams are more Randomness in its movement feel free to animate the rotation of the empty as a last step add the Ocean material to this new object foreign if needed you can use the same method to add white water to the front and sides of the ship these are oftentimes not that visible in a lot of footage so adding them separately gives you more flexibility the problem with combining two sequences is that the speed of the water needs to match so changing the playback speed individual resolve and re-exporting it was my way to go rendering out a quick EV animation can give you an idea if the Wake works or not it is also important to adjust the speed of the ship itself to mesh up with the Wake otherwise it can look very fake with all that done here is what your result might look like even though it looks quite nice you can clearly see the downside of this method since it's basically just an animated texture there's no interaction between wake and ocean also dependent on the camera angle the way can look very flat another downside is that the quality is highly dependent on the quality of the footage to find let me say this there is not a lot to choose from online especially not for free So In My World War II animation I hit a lot of these limitations by just adding movement to the camera and enabling motion blur it might be frustrating to have to do that but it's still better than simulating for days just for it to look even worse

Channel: MLT Studios

Views: 26,162

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Id: 14SNmHvVBio

Length: 5min 28sec (328 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 11 2023