Tutorial 198: Faking Waves

Severo Ojea | Oct 28, 2019

Creating water effects in Cinema 4D Does not always have to involve laborious simulations. Using simple tools you can easily create a dynamic toon-shaded wave animation. To see an excellent version of this technique, which we referenced for this tutorial, check out everfresh on twitter. There's some killer no-particle no-simulation work on that feed.

By displacing a plane using fields we'll build a wave. And then we'll add foam to the top of the wave by running two splines through the same setup and projecting them onto our wave surface using Magic Projector from Nitro 4D. We'll then clone spheres onto those splines, and then mesh the two together with VDB Mesher. With a simple material built using the Sketch and Toon cel shader in the luminance channel, we'll texture our foam. Then we'll finish it off by texturing the water using a simple noise setup—also in luminance.

And that's it. As you can see on everfresh's twitter, there's a lot of things that can be built using similar setups.

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