Flooding a city – can AE handle that ?

[Hans Van vliet]

Man, that’s a difficult shot that I feel AE isn’t really set up for. Even if you took footage of waves, it would just look like footage over your still. Not knowing what the setup for the scene is like, you might need waves to crash into buildings or around them for that matter.

If you can live with out the waves crashing against it and all that, then AE can do something about it but it’s not going to look AMAZINGLY real. Video your wave, either do a BEST match of the stills angle with your eye or shoot it all from top view. Then create masks, cut out all your buildings in the stills.. whats in the forground .. where the water is going up too and all that stuff. Then turn your footage into a 3d layer and or corner pin it so that the agle matches (it’s going to look square if you use the top view footage). As for the water coming into the shot, good luck?? 😛

Here is 2 other set ups that would look great 😛

Build a small model of everything in a fish tank and well, get the camera lined up .. make sure all your buildings are green screened or even just grey / white or black (depending on your transfer) and then fill it 😛

Failing that,

Depending on what your budget allows get 3d programs with some wave setups or hire a company to do it :P. Realwave or Realflow would do the trick, and then there is Glu3d now and a few others. You would need to set up the gemoetry of the scene in 3d and then you let the software solve the waves.

Other then that, that’s all I can really think off.

Good luck, tricky setup.

..::hunz..

[Chris Smith]

Just keep in mind, it’s all relative to youe expectations for the effect. “The day after” effect with the ocean coming into Manhattan took months and months of work by a top notch team to simulate that effect.

If you want to get somewhere even close to that, and the shot is really important to you, I think the best approach would be Maya Unlimiteds Fluid Effects and Ocean Simulations. But that would still have to play off of geometry in a scene. You could use camera mapping (photogrammetry) with your city photos to build geometry that took on the look of your photos and get the water to interact with that. But all this is still a LOT of work and investment of time.

If it was an all AE simple solution, then I’d take your stills, Roto out paths for your ocean. Use something like Psunami to create the ocean surface. Animate how it pours into the streets. Then use a particle generator like PP, CC Particle Woeld, or best of all Particular and create the effect of a white head on the front of your animated masks to make it look like active water moving through the streets.

Also to help sell the illusion of water is to set up displaced inverted duplicates of your buildings to look like reflections in the waves.

Chris Smith
https://www.sugarfilmproduction.com

[Thehardmenpath]

That looks really hard to make in AE, certainly.

If I were you, I would rather try to do something else that probably suits much better in After Effects: Look for real floodings and replace the buildings.