A quicker splash

Architectural animations are at their best when they contain interesting movement and camera work. However, adding dynamism isn’t always straightforward because buildings don’t move! As a result, we sometimes have to look to other elements for motion in our environment; animated fountains and water being one of the most effective.

When asked to produce animated fountains, the first thing artists tend to do is jump straight into the ParticleFX settings. This is fine if you happen to own a particle plug-in such as RealFlow, but for many types of water, such as spray, it’s a real struggle to achieve realistic results using LightWave’s standard HyperVoxels. What’s worse, all particle effects come at a heavy render cost.

In this tutorial we’re going to explore a technique we developed for our Pshelf Water collection of presets that creates spray water using surface textures. We’re going to produce a wide plume fountain that will animate, complete with gravitational effects. The major advantages of this technique are that it’s faster to render and produces a softer, more pleasing result than using HyperVoxels.

In essence, the technique uses two elements in combination – animated surface textures and endomorphs. In the first part of the tutorial, we’ll explore these underlying concepts by producing a simple accelerating surface on a subdivided plane. In the latter parts, we’ll implement these elements by building an animating fountain rig, which can be quickly dropped into any LightWave project you’re working on.

Click here to download the support files (~40MB)