Attached Link: Men o' war

I am from Germany and completely new in 3D modelling and animation in general and especially in Carrara 6. I am still working through Mark’s very instructive tutorials and trying out the one or other feature. Deeply impressed by the rich possibilities of the programme obviously a new hobby is born. Now I came across my first – but probably not last – question. I am not sure if this topic has discussed before. I haven't found any post here and in other places: Is it possible to animate the sails of a boat moving in the wind as it was done in the film “men o’ war” (cf. Link) in Carrara? I tried modifier – waves with a spline object, but the result was not convincing. Any help would be appreciated.

Juergen

I would think for a sail, a vertex object would look more real.  I don't use the vertex room enough to be able to tell you how to animate in there but I am sure someone has done that at one point or another and can help.

Sails and flags can be animated using a fractal noise shader in the displacement channel. The problem with this trick is to get the pin points in place.
Maybe you can create shade domains for the pin points and the sail, and dont add any displacement map in the pin points. Maybe a wave shader can be better in the displacement channel...

Would it work to animate a sail-flap morph (done in the vertex room)?

Here a simple teste using fractal noise:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJUdqFdQNb0

In this screen shot ,at each second, I made another object visible and the previous one invisible The resulting avi is a puffing out cloth. Brian PM me if you want the tiny avi.

That idea in my post above is pretty rough--- I am no person to talk about motion stuff in Carrara really. It just seems very adequate for most motion things going back as far as version 4 at least.

I recently did a little.mov  "Roundtuit!--In the fullness of time"--see screen shot.
It's 25.5 MB if anyone wants it--again, pm me. (It has sound and all--I had fun!)
Brian

Thank you for all help and suggestions. In the next time I will try them out and see what works best.
Juergen