Chris Smith
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Go to the Cow archives for this one. It has been discussed soooooooo many times. I think there was a thread just last week or so.
You should find all the answers you need from those that have tread before you.
Chris Smith
https://www.sugarfilmproduction.com -
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 -
lol..sorry 🙂
Although to back peddle though with a heavy hand of truth, The Trapcode products are so brilliant because they provide advanced options ususally only found in 3D apps and are made so elegantly for the 2.5D environment allowing spontaneous creativity in a compositor rather than planning it out in great detail in said 3D app. Which is what I had to do to get the 3D stroke like effect in Maya.
Chris Smith
https://www.sugarfilmproduction.com -
I had to do something recently where I wanted 3D stroke but in true 3D as well. So I recreated it in Maya.
3D stroke is basically a bunch of white circles along a path at a specific density. Then you have settings for the size of those circles (stroke width). Feather equals how soft the outside of the circles are.
What gives the illusion that the lines have thickness in 3D space is that each one of those circles auto-orients to camera all the time.
That’s it in a nutshell.
So in Maya:
Create a curve which will be your path (in true 3D of course).
Create a particle emiiter. Attch the emmiter to the path. So that it emits along the path. Set the emmision speed to zero so that it seeds the path with a bunch of evenly spaced particles that don’t fly away. Now in PS or AE create a square comp. In it create a white circle. The black should be transparent.
Save as a still farme (Maya likes targa files for sprites) with the alpha channel as well. In Maya for the particle type choose sprite. For the sprite image choose the file you made with the white circle. Sprites in Maya always auto orient to camera automatically.
Now you will have 3D stroke replicated in Maya. If you want it to taper then apply a ramp to sprite scale. If you want it softer then on the file input node select gauss as the filter and set it to your liking.
And of course Maya being the insanely modifiable beast that it is, you can not only replicate every other thing 3D stroke does, but do a lot more. Good luck.
Chris Smith
https://www.sugarfilmproduction.com