1. Assignment 10
A Flag on
the Ocean

2. Start out by opening up a new page in top view of the Blender and if you have the default cube you should delete it.
After that add a plane as your flag from the top view.
Add-->Mesh-->Plane
Move the plane right in the intersection of the x and y axis
Scale your flag in X direction by 1.9 unit and in Y direction by 1 unit
S, Y, 1 <enter>
S, X, 1.9 <enter>
Now, scale your flag by 4 units
S, 4 <enter>
Later you need to set a texture to the flag. You can search for a picture of your country flag in the internet. You may also visit this site to search for a flag

3. Subdivide your flag 5 or 6 times, the more you subdivide the more detailed it will be in the end
Next you can make your flag a bit more flag like. Go into Object Mode, Hit F7, and then click the Physics Button.
Now click on “Soft Body” panel. A bunch of options should appear. Change the settings as seen below.
Now move to front view and rotate (press R twice) your flag to see its dimensions as shown below

4. Now it’s time to put in the wind
Now it’s time to put in the wind. In Blender the wind needs to link up to something that is “creating the wind”. Since we don’t want to see a box just sitting there next to our flag you will want to add an empty to your scene.
<Add-->Empty>
I will look like a tiny X,Y,Z axis.
First move the empty right in the center of x and z axis in front view and do the same in other views. Now move to top view and do the following
G, X, -8
G, Y, -4
Move back to front view and with your empty still selected go to the Physics area (F7) and under the list box of the Fields panel select “Wind”.
When the settings show up
Select Wind in the pull-down tab, Change Strength to 25.0 and Fall-off to 2.0.
As you can probably tell, the wind is currently shooting straight up. Rotate it around the X-axis by 90 degrees and around the Z-axis by about 50.
R, X, 90
R, Z, 50

5. If you hit Alt+A you will notice the wind working as your flag flies off into the distance.
Let’s make the flag stay in place. Select the flag and go into Weight Paint Mode (This is in the pull down tab with Object Mode).
Hit F9. There should be a panel labeled ‘Paint’.
In the paint panel, “weight paint” makes certain points that you paint “heavier”, making them stay in place. Red indicates very heavy and will not budge while blue will move easily.
Set weight to 1 and paint the top left and bottom left corner red then set it to .85 to paint the edge orange

6. Switch to object mode and in font view add a pole by creating a cylinder. Scale the cylinder in z direction, slightly extrude the top part of it and then scale it 0 to close its top as shown in the following pictures
Do NOT join the pole to the flag. Make the pole any color you like and give your flag the texture of the flag picture you downloaded from the internet
Top view
Side view
Front view

7. Side view Render view Top view Front view
Before hitting Alt-A again we need to go back into the Physics Buttons, into the Soft Body panel and right next to the Use Goal button there is a small square pull-out button. If you click it, it will say Group as a selection. Select it.
Now you can hit Alt+A and see your flag move in the wind. It will take a couple seconds for your flag to straighten out and then it should start flowing back and forth.
Add couple of hemi lights, ground, and camera and fill the sky with stars. Then render to see what you have. Here is the picture in all views
Side view
Render view
Top view
Front view

8. Creating Water Make the lamp to be a Hemi lamp
Move the flag and the empty (wind) to layer 2
Remove the material of the plane if you have added any: Select plane, under “Links and Pipeline” panel click on x to remove the material assigned to the plane
We want to give the plane the texture of the water
In the “Links and Pipeline” panel, “add new” and then select the texture button (F6). Click “Add new” in the texture panel.
In the list box, choose texture type 'Clouds' and increase the NoiseSize to 0.350, which gives a slightly better resolution, and select 'Hard noise'.

9. The latter is important to make the crests tighter
The latter is important to make the crests tighter. It's not perfect but closer to real waves than uniform soft noise
Back in the material buttons, in the “map to” panel deselect “Col” and select “Nor” instead and set the Nor slider to 0.8 for creating large waves.
Now for the small waves, we put the same texture into the second channel and adjust its size in the Map Input panel to be about four times smaller
So click on texture button again (F6) and click on the second channel and then press add new. Again choose texture type 'Clouds', NoiseSize to 0.350, and select 'Hard noise' as you did for the first channel.
Now go to “map input” and set sizeX, sizeY and sizeZ to 4. Then in the “map to” deselect “Col” and select “Nor” again and this time set the Nor slider to 0.6.
Make a test render. It look should similar to this:

10. Reflection
To make the plane look like water we have to simulate the observed surface properties.
Clear water does not reflect light in a diffuse way. Therefore in the “Shaders” panel turn the Ref slider to zero. However, if you want the water look muddy, a brownish color and some diffuse reflection might be appropriate.
In the “specular shader” list box that is in the Shaders panel, choose the Blinn shader because it provides the possibility to create highlights with very sharp edges, just as highlights on a water surface look like.
Set Spec to 1.0, Hard to 150 and Refr to 10.0 proved to look good. Make another test render:

11. All we need now is a reflection of the environment in the water
All we need now is a reflection of the environment in the water. We can use an existing environment map for this, because in our test scene there is no surrounding that could be reflected by ray tracing. Use the envmap picture that is provided in the web site called “beach_envmap.png”
Click on the texture button (F6), select new channel and click on “Add new”
In the list box choose EnvMap. Select Load and press Load Image to get the envmap into Blender.
Back in the Material context select Refl on the Map Input panel and map the texture to Cmir (select map to and click on Cmir).
Now the material is highly reflective over the whole surface like quicksilver.

12. To finalize the material and to change the look from quicksilver to water, still a few things need to be changed
three things need to be changed on the Mirror Transp panel.
First, in the links and pipeline panel, turn on ZTransp to make the water transparent.
Then in the “Mirror Transp” panel increase the Fresnel value to 3.3 to make the reflection depend on the viewing angle. Finally, in the same panel move the SpecTra slider to 1.0 for nice opaque highlights.
Because the default blue background looks a bit cheesy here, let's change it to black in the World context before rendering the final still image.
The following shows the light setting and render image
top
Render
Front
Side

13. Animation
Animating this water in Blender is not difficult at all.
For both wave texture channels create keyframes for the texture offset by pressing I with the mouse cursor over the material buttons and selecting Ofs in the pop-up menu.
Then go to frame 100 and in the map input panel Change ofsX, ofsY, and ofsZ to 0.6 for both texture channels and create keyframes again. The ofsZ, Y, and X value influences the shape of the waves without shifting them along the water plane which lies in the XY plane. Higher values lead to faster movement, lower values to slower movement.
Create a simple boat and place it under the flag. To create a boat, add a sphere, cut it in half in the edit mode, scale it in x direction , extrude region the end point and scale it to 0. Or do anything you like that looks like a boat.

14. In the IPO window switch to IPO type Material and change the Ofs IPO curves for both wave texture channels to linear interpolation for equal speed during the whole animation. To do this
Switch to IPO Curve Editor window
In the IPO type list box change the type to “Material”
Press A to select both points
In the curve menu make the interpolation mode to be linear

15. You can make the color of one the lights blue if you want the water to be partially blue
Set the end of animation to frame 100
Press Animation button and let it animate
After animation is done, press play to test it
Save your work and save the animated work

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