I am dropping rigid bodies onto iclone water surfaces.  I am looking for a realistic splash into the water. I've gone through all the standard particle emitters and I can get a little spray which is ok but what I really want is a displacement of the water. I have found that by layering a soft cloth over the water surface and adjusting the material just right I can get a really nice effect when the rigid dynamic prop hits that combined surface.  But this only works when the first prop hits the water and I have lots of props falling one after another in the same scene. I can't get the soft cloth to pull itself together after the first few breakthoughs though I have been adjusting properties like crazy. Does anybody have any great ideas?

No great ideas.  I think you're going beyond the boundaries of what iClone can do.
Sure, movie-making is all about make-believe and trickery, but this sounds like it will be difficult to do (convincingly) in iClone.

Depending on the level of realism you're after, you might even need to resort to doing some animation in Blender (or similar) and then trying to composite things together.  I think you have quite a challenge ahead of you.

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Using Particles Only I created a Skipping Stones Water Splash... 










Also, in iClone 6 I started playing with manipulators to control water movement (simulation) with Soft Cloth.  PhysX "kinda" works, but not as good as Bullet Physics.




https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i9HDNb6lM58

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No great idea, just a thought that it is only the end result that has to look like what you want. How you got that end result doesnt matter.

Movie producers often string a bunch of seperate shots together so that they all end up looking like one shot taken at the same time.
So if you cant make this work for more than a couple of objects maybe you can make a clip of each object hitting your water and put them together in your video editor?
If your doing this for a video that is.
Just a thought

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What kind of splash are you looking for? A controlled "milk-drop", or a boulder in open water? How close-up?

If this is for a music video, Blender may indeed be a better bet. Their FluidSim is quite good.

@Cricky,

The "skipping stones" clip was an excellent start.
I have an  idea that might help take it to the next level... "secondary splashes."

When the first major splash goes up and lands, that water makes smaller splashes.

I remember noticing the same thing in a big-budget movie called, "Star Wars - Episode I."  When their underwater "submarine" surfaced, there was a nice splash effect, but none of the secondary ones, which really spoiled the realism.  They probably didn't use iClone ( ) but how about that; you have the opportunity to out-do them! 

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what everyone else already said.......iclones particle / physics can take you so far, heavy math calculations aren't really good for real time rendering, so you need work arounds.. ....you would either have to make your own in blender as mentioned, or get a green screen splash from youtube and simply composite in the video editor ,   or make a prop with the video masked out for iclone.    It really depends how much detail you want and how far you want to go.



I enjoy the compositing approach myself...  hitfilm / sony moviestudio combo is very good for that.
here's a video i made experimenting with green screen / compositing.

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Thanks for all replies and suggestions. And I too think the skipping stone demo was pretty good though I am trying to do this in an extreme close up. 

I am so challenged to get this project finished that I really dont have time to get into Blender which I tried many years ago and found extremely complicated. 

I have some greenscreen splashes on my harddisk and when I start putting my scenes into vegas I will try some superimposing there. 

The fact is that a one shot splash -- in my case a frog (imported from sketchup) dropping into the ocean -- looks fantastic when I position a softcloth just right on top of the water, but I have a rain of frogs and it's not easy to get the softcloth to handle that.  I've tried a plethora of weight maps and cloth sizes to no avail. 

As suggested, I am now focussing on the descent of just one of the frogs and using water type props for others. The water type props look a little too geometric, but I turn them on, expand them in just a few frames and fade them out very quickly and this is going to have to do.

As for particles, the present bug in iC6 makes them very awkward to work with and the truth is I have never really understood the timing of those things anyway as there always seems to be an unpredictable delay.  But I put the magic fountain particle on a jerky path and let it sort of run amok over the whole scene for extra effect. 

which particles did you work with and how did you modify them?

Just another thought with the softcloth seeing as you say it works great for 1 or 2 frogs

Have you tried using multiple softcloths with 1 in the correct place and the rest positioned out of the way and then as a frog hits the soft cloth position a new one in place for the next frog? Again, just a thought.
Im interrested in the steps you took to do this if you dont mind posting them. There are always many ways to do anything and would like to see what you did

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