Ireal Animated Oceans and Animate 2

cgborden_fedf493d91

I am having trouble with Animate 2 and the new Ireal Animated oceans.  Although I am finally able to drag the animations into the Animate 2 timeline, nothing moves.

BeeMKay

You have to first select the ocean in the scene tab. Then, click the + icon in the animate tab. The ocean should now show up in the list of animate. Then, drag the matchin animation there.

I can do some screen shots for you if that helps, but I am not at my PC right now.

PA_ThePhilosopher

@cgborden_fedf493d91,

Also keep in mind you need the full version of Animate2 (not Animate Lite) to animate the oceans.

Hope you enjoy the product. 

 

-P

BigueNique

PA_ThePhilosopher said:

Also keep in mind you need the full version of Animate2 (not Animate Lite) to animate the oceans.

Well, I confirm that I was actually able to animate the ocean with aniMate Lite (the free version that ships with DAZ Studio) using the provided sample scene template, which comes already loaded with aniblocks in place!

The scene is located in Environments\Landscapes\iREAL Animated Ocean Water System\Sample Scene and is called Animated Ocean Sample-Scene-Template.duf. Once the scene is loaded, each of the 4 identical ocean figures have their track in the aniMate Lite panel and you can even add, delete and move around the aniblocks. The scene template uses the Quiet Cove ocean figure. I was able change the materials of the water figure and the sea floor plane, but I couldn't unfortunately change the ocean figure itself for one of the 3 other provided ocean styles from DAZ Studio. There is no way aniMate Lite will let you create the needed animation tracks for newly loaded figures...

The good news is that you can use the provided template to hack your way around. Since the 4 provided ocean figures (Dead Ocean, Quiet Cove, Rolling Ocean and Violent Ocean) have been consistently designed (they use the exact same folder layout and file names to store their geometries and morphs), you can modify the provided template file  with relative ease in order to make it load a different figure. I just did it for the Dead Ocean animation. I simply unpacked the compressed .duf file to uncompress .dsf and named it "Quiet Cove.dsf". I then created a copy of the new file and named it "Dead Ocean.dsf". I opened it in Notepad++, and replaced every instance of strings "Quiet%20Cove", "QUIET COVE", "/Quiet_Cove/" and "Quiet-Cove", to their respective counterparts ("Dead%20Ocean", "DEAD OCEAN", "/Dead_Ocean/" and "Dead-Ocean"). Saved, opened the new scene in DAZ Studio, and BANG! the scene loaded with figures, morphs, animations and even node names updated to reflect the change. And the animation is perfectly working in aniMate Lite!

Here is a quick and dirty OpenGL render of the animation made this way, solely using aniMate Lite. Hopefully the hack will work ith Rolling Ocean and Violent Ocean too!

Another good news is that the iREAL Animated Ocean Water System ocean figures work perfectly with DAZ Studio's node instancing -- a fabulous feature! So you can keep one single ocean figure and create as many instances of it as needed (this is what I did above). Just tile them at exactly 1000 units interval and they will move together seaminglessly. Materials and animations applied to the main figure instantly reflect on each instance!

@PA_ThePhilosopher: Thanks for this really outstanding product! It would be a great thing to provide animated templates for each ocean style, so that your customers that do not own aniMate2 can still enjoy the animations, without needing to hack their way!