All images from Maya Plugin Power © Course Technology PTR.

This month, VFXWorld continues a series of six excerpts of the Course Technology PTR book Maya Plugin Power, which will give VFXWorld readers to learn how to take advantage of the myriad of plugins available to Maya users.

Dealing with liquids simulations in Maya is best served through a stand-alone program from Next Limit, called RealFlow. Using RealFlow it is fairly easy to generate complex simulations for export to Maya. This includes water systems such as object wakes. Here is a quick look.

Now let’s take a look at generating wakes in a Scottish loch.

The Wakes of Loch Ness
Next Limit used to have a wave-generating program called RW. This has since been incorporated into RF. RW permits the user to create some particularly fascinating waves. Let’s work a simple tutorial on generating wakes in a lake. Figure 2 shows various states of the Loch Ness monster. The highest-resolution model of Nessie, to the far right, may be used as the final model, once the waves have been generated in RF. The middle model is a lower-resolution proxy of the higher-resolution model. The far-left model is the proxy for use in RF and was built to avoid complications associated with Nessie’s pointy back spikes.

[FIGURE 1] Multiple Nessie models serve different purposes for this scene.

Start RF and create a project called nessie. Import the model super_low_ness.obj (visit Course PTR website for more information). Click on the Add a RealWave to the Scene icon. An RW plane is placed in the scene. Under the Nodes window, the RW plane is listed as Realwave01. Right-click on the node and rename it Loch_Ness. In the Node Params window under the Node tab, change the Z scale of the RW plane to 20. The image should look like Figure 2.

[FIGURE 2] The RW plane is scaled in the Z direction.

With the Timeslider set to 0, translate Nessie to the far left of the RW plane. Right-click on the model and keyframe its position, as shown in Figure 3. At frame 200 move Nessie to the far right side of the RW plane.