Indoor Waterwall

In this tutorial we are going to take a look at a method of creating an animated texture for one of those moving waters indoor waterfalls.

We will accomplish this by creating an animated bump map texture, and in order to create this texture we will be making ourselves a particle flow particle system which will hopefully move like water over an imperfect surface.

First, we need to make a surface for our water. This surface will serve as a method of controlling the speed of our particles based on a grayscale texture. White makes them go faster, and black makes them slow.

In your front viewport, create a plane. This plane should be the dimensions that you wish your indoor waterfall to be. I am going to make mine 90 Length and 60 width, with 1 segment in each.

This plane is only to serve as a size placeholder, and a way of controlling our particles for the creation of our animated texture, so we don't need it to appear in the render when we are finished.

Right click on the plane to bring up the Quad menu, and select Object Properties... from the list.

A new menu popup will appear, find and unmark the box labeled "Renderable".

When it is unchecked, click OK.

This will allow us to leave the plane in place to control our particles without having it show up in our render.

Our next step is to create the texture that will be the controlling gray scale factor in our particles. Open up your Material Editor and find an empty material slot.

In the Diffuse Channel box, add a Noise.

Adjust the Noise Parameters like I did below:

Then go ahead and apply it to your Plane.

The variations in white to black we will use in our particle Flow system next.

Now, go to your create tab, and we'll select Particle Systems from the drop down menu in Geometry.

Find and turn on the PF Source creation button, I normally have you start with an empty flow in Particle View, but this time we want to click and drag out the shape of our icon to our liking.

Once the PF Source button is toggled on, go to your top view and click and drag out a PFSource Icon that matches the Width of your plan, and extends forward just a little.

This will create a long and thin particle emitter that will work nicely keeping all the particles flat up against our plane and sized correctly, you can further adjust your icon settings by keeping the icon selected and going to your Modify Tab.

Next let's move our icon to the top of our plane where the water would be coming from and dropping down to the bottom.

By drawing out a Particle Flow Source like this, it comes with some basic settings already there, if you scrub across your timeline you should see some particles shooting from the top of your plane straight down:

They are not doing what we want them to so we have some work do in Particle View. You can use the shorcut to get there which is 6 (as long as your keyboard shortcut toggle button is on), You can find it in the Graph Editors main menu, or you can click the Particle View button in the settings of your PFSource Icon on the Modify Tab.

Particle View is divided into three parts,

The light grey area is the flow chart stage, the list in white with all the events in it is called the depot, and the dark grey to the right is the command panel where we will adjust all our settings.

Because we made our PFSource Icon first, you will already have a couple of Flowchart boxes in your stage area.

Some of these we will keep and simply modify, and others we will have to add to it.

First, select the Birth in the second box and we'll adjust it over to the right.

Give it a negative 175 birth, this will changed based on the size of your object and I'll tell you how I got to this start conclusion in awhile.

My Emit Stop is 100, which is the length of my timeline currently.

I have increased our particles to a fairly high amount here at 20,000 to give us plenty to work with.

Next, find the Speed 01 in the second box in your stage area, select it and adjust the speed to the right. Reduce the number to 10.

We want slow falling water, and this speed will just give us a place for the water to start, we will control the speed later on using our gray scale texture on the plane.

Next, find and select the Shape from our Event box and adjust its settings.

Water is not square, therefore we need to make it round. So select Sphere 20 or 80 sides is up to you and how smooth you want your water to flow down the surface of our waterwall.

I have chosen 80, if your computer can't handle the geometry you may need to reduce it to 20.

I have also reduced the size to 1.25, these spheres are going to be the ripples in our surface water, so we don't want them too big, or too small that we can't see them.

Next select the Display 01 under our Shape setting, in the top dropdown menu, change it from ticks, to Geometry so we can see our spheres and make sure they are the size we want.

I am looking at mine at frame 0 and yours should look a lot like it, except for maybe the color of the spheres.

We are done modifying the original settings now, we are going to have to add a few more things from the Depot list below our stage area.

Find in the depot Speed By Surface, and click and drag it up to our Event01 box. Drop it right below the Display, but keep it inside the box.

The appearance in blue just before you drop it lets you know it will be added to the current event box and not as a new seperate event outside in the stage area that is still blank.

Then select the new Speed By Surface, and adjust its settings to the right.

First, select Control Speed Continuously from the top drop down menu. Set your Speed at 40.0 this will give it a maximum for the portions where our water moves a little quicky.

Click on the By List button, and add our Plane we made in the beginning to the Surface Geometry list.

At this point you'll see your particles shoot straight out away from the plane, don't worry, we'll fix it.

Check the box named Speed By Material, and make sure the dropdown menu under it is set to Grayscale Multiplier (remember that texture we put on our plane?)

And last make sure the Direction drop down menu is set to Parallel to Surface, that should fix the particles flying straight forward.

If you can, scrub down your timeline and see how the particles start paying attention to the greyscale texture on the plane, some of them begin moving faster when they enter an area that is lighter colored grey to white, and they slow down the darker the gray gets.

If you are having trouble seeing the movement, you may want to change the setting in your Display 01 back to Ticks.

You can also notice now in your side view, that the particles are making it to the bottom of the plane and then swinging back up and around and going up the backside of the plane, this we don't want. In order to stop our particles at the bottom, we will need to add a Delete to our event.

Find in the Depot the Delete, and drag it up and drop it underneath the new Speed By Surface like in the image to the right ->

All your particles will vanish from your viewports, don't worry we'll fix it.

Adjust the Delete event's settings on the right to match mine below:

I increase the lifespan number until at Frame 0 my particles reach the very bottom of the plane and then disappear before they curl up around the back side, I leave a variation of about 10 just to keep things a little more random like water would probably behave anyhow.

We are almost done and ready to render our texture out. First, we need to add one last thing to our event list, and that is a Material Static.

Once you have added it to the end we will make a texture.

Open up your Material Editor (M), and select an empty texture slot and then click the Diffuse channel box.

From the list, find and add "Falloff" as the Diffuse texture.

In the falloff parameters, we want the White color swatch to be on top, so simply click the Swap button highlighted above.

Your rend resulting texture should look like this:

With both the material Editor and the Particle View open, click and drag your new texture to the None button in the Material Static settings. Like this:

When the popup menu appears, select Instance and then hit OK. In many cases you will have to refresh your particle system for the texture to take effect. To do this, click the little light bulb icon at the top of our Event01 box, and then again to turn it off and on.

Once you have turned the Event back on the texture should have been refreshed changing your colored particles to greyscale like this:

Now we get to render our animated texture and to do so we need a direct front on view, so we will use our Front viewport. Select your Front Viewport and hit Shift+F, this will turn on your safe frames.

A yellow safe frame box will show up, letting you know that this is exactly what will show up in your render, clearly it does not match up to your plane at all, so we will have to adjust it.

Hit F10 to open up the Render Setup dialogue.

On the Common Tab which should show up default.

Under Output size, make sure the drop down says Custom, and make your Width and Height something that is a multiplier of what your plane actually is, we made our plane 60 width x 90 height, so

600 width x 900 width will give us a nice large render that should fit our plane nice and perfectly.

Your front viewport should have changed to something looking like this now:

Now all we have to do is zoom in until the edges of our plane fill the entire screen without getting much if any of our particles cut off.

You can use your middle mouse wheel to zoom in and out, but if you want to be exact I recommend using the Zoom magnifying glass button in the bottom right corner of 3DS Max.

Then just zoom in until the Plane fits in your safe frames as close as you can get it!

Now we just render it out as a series of images that we will then use as an animated texture in creating the water wall.

So hit F10 to open up your render setup again, and select Active Time Segment instead of Single.

Then scroll down until you see the Render Output settings, and click on the Save Files... button.

Click on the Files... button, and find an appropriate place to save your images. Remember there will be 101 images, so you might want to make a folder just for them.

give it a name, and what image type you want it to save for you, then click Save. I have told it to create Jpegs.

The Jpeg settings menu will appear once you have hit the Save button.

Just move the top slider all the way to Best, and then hit the OK button.

That's it, we are ready to render our animated texture. Click on the Render button at the bottom of the Render Setup dialogue.

This will probably take a few minutes, depending on your computer processor speed........

When the render is finished check the folder you told it to save in, you should have 101 jpegs that look something like this...

Now, you can save your 3DS Max file, and then open a completely new file, we are done with the particle effect as it is going to end up being an animated texture map only.

Once you have started up a brand new 3DS Max file, create a box about the same Length and Width dimensions as our plane.

This will be the main surface of our water wall, but you can really honestly apply our animated texture to almost anything with the same effect.

Open up your Material Editor (M), and select an empty texture slot.

Choose any color, or add a stone texture etc. to the Diffuse channel.

And make it very shiny like the surface is going to be wet after all. I used 160 Specular and 55 Glossiness.

Then scroll down to the Maps rollout, and find the Bump map.

Click on the long None button next to Bump in the list of maps... Then from the resulting list, select Bitmap.

Then navigate to the folder where you rendered out your animated texture.

Select the very first image of our 101 images, and then at the bottom of the window check the box labeled Sequence.

Then hit the Open button.

When the next popup shows up, just verify that it will have 0 to 100 frames in the animated texture, and hit OK.

Your finished texture should look bumpy, and if you scrub down the timeline you will see it moving and behind like water droplets.

Now simply add your texture to your waterwall box, finish making the waterfall look how you want, and light and render your animation.

It will look something like this when it is completed, pretty cool eh?

http://animation.diclementi.com/waterwall.html