CREATE REALISTIC OCEAN WAVES

Digital Domain's Mathew Rotman shows how to establish the look and feel of a believable ocean

- Mathew Rotman

In Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, the sweeping aerial shots of the Royal Sea Leopard against the Atlantic Ocean set the stage for the dramatic final battle on the water, but most audiences never realised these shots were entirely CGI. Shooting a scene like this on the water would be complicated, expensive and impossible to control.

In the time it takes to set up a camera, the sun could begin to set or disappear behind clouds, making continuity next to impossible. Directors would rather be able to say just how choppy the waves are or what time of day the scene is.

Enter the 3D FX artist. Because oceans in 3D and in real life vary quite a bit, there is no one-sizefits-all solution. To make the scale of the ocean believable, you need large rolling waves and tiny surface ripples. You need to vary size, speed and direction. And notably, nothing can appear to be repeating or tiling.

You can have the highest resolution and most beautifully rendered simulations, but without a realistic ocean spectrum to ground it and provide scale and speed reference points, the effect will ultimately fall flat.

In this tutorial, we’ll be using Houdini’s Ocean Spectrum tools, and pro tips and tricks to create believable oceans for aerials, wide shots and close-ups. They can even drive water simulations to interact with characters and objects hitting waves.

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