Animating Waves

Water animation done in Bongo, using the Displacement plug-in in Rhino.

Please note
This can only be rendered using renderers that support the RDK feature in Rhino.

How to do it?

Download the finished example model from here (Rhino 5.0 model).

To create the waves do the following:

  1. Open Texture Palette in Rhino, create a Noise Texture and rename it Wave shape.
  2. For the Wave shape texture, set Spectral Synthesis Type to Turbulence and check Invert. Check WCS and set Size to X: 5.0 Y: 20.0 Z: 5.0.
  3. Create a plane centered at (0,0,0), 20 units wide and 20 units long.
  4. Select the plane and add Displecement (Proprties tab > Displacement). Pick Wave shape as the texture, High as the Initial quality, you might have to set it Extremly Hig depending on the result you want. Make sure Refine sensitivity is set to 1.0.
  5. Preview the waves in Shaded viewport.

To make the waves move:

  1. Right click at Timeline tick number 0 and select Add Keyframe > Conent(s) > texture > Wave shape > Precalculated. Do the same at tick number 50.
  2. Open Keyframe Editor and browse the tree to Render Content > Wave shape > Properties > Noise Texture > Texture offset.
  3. Select tick 50 and change the Texture offsetto X: 0 Y: 0 Z: 10. Close Keyframe Editor.

Preview the wave animation by pressing and holding down left mouse button on the small right arrow button of the Timeline slider.

Please note
The Displacement will take some time to calculate for each frame.