Question 2 dynamic elements interacting, one partially animated

[trassalg]

What is the best way to tackle the following problem with Maya and RealFlow:

I have a dog and an ocean. The dog jumps into the ocean and the water needs to push the dog around, but also the dog needs to splash up water. Do I animate the dog's actions and movement and then place this in a RealFlow water element or is there a way to animate the dog's body movements, but not X/Y axis movements in the body of water, and have the water element force him back and forth?

Thanks for any tips you can give.

[ragupasta]

As ive never used Maya for anything else but modeling and small animations, this is a stab in the dark, but a logical one.
If you are using anything but a proxy dog, your calculation times will be huge if its all dynamic simulations. If you are going to do it that way use a proxy dog that is animated to swim and use that to calculate the wake effects, then swap dogs for rendertime.

However there is another way and if you understand what I say you might know the techniques used inside Maya. Maya has a way to "Attribute transfer" iirc. So you can have the animted dog, the ocean plane/realflow mesh imported in. Use whatever constraint needed to anchor a locator to a point on the surface, and attrib-transfer the loactions, translations and rotations to the dog. Then you could use again a proxy dog for displacement to the surface using the proxy to get a selection of points, then displace the surface using shaders to create wakes, then multiply that to the already displaced surface.

Can you group points in Maya by colour?

If so for the splashes, use the proxy pooch and add a abitrary colour to it, then attribute transfer that colour based on distance onto the surface. Then group those points by that colour and use that as emission for the particles for spray (as it will be particle based). However you will need to bake that out however Maya does it, because you will need to remove that transfered attribute before rendertime, or your ocean around your dog might be red/"insert colour transfered here".

I have no idea the difficulty curve doing that in Maya, but its a workaround if you can get it to work!

Good luck!!