En:Add-the-Sea
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What is Add-the-Sea?
Add-the-Sea (in short: ATS, colloquial Atze) is the biggest and best-known product by Motion-Gimmick. It is used for creating realistic waves on planes and letting objects swim on them, thus making it possible to create convincing oceans and lakes. In addition to the deformer, Add-the-Sea also comes with a special shader, which creates procedural foam maps that are directly dependent from the generated waves: The 4ATS Shader.
Advantages & Disadvantages
The biggest advantage of Add-the-Sea is the fact that it is not a fluid simulation. It's neither particle-based nor voxel-based. It is a deformer that works on geometry. In fact, not really simulating, it does a really great job faking the behaviour of moving water. It is extremely fast and quickly processes large numbers of waves on geometry with high polygon count.
Concept
Like any other deformer, an Add-the-Sea object must be child of the object to be deformed. Any number of Wave objects can be stacked into the Add-the-Sea. The waves then realisticly add into each other.
If objects should be influenced by the water (e.g. swim on it), they need a tag which can be created via the Add-the-Sea object.
Wave types
There are different types of waves:
- Linear wave
- Simple linear waves, as blown by a perfectly non-chaotic wind. Height, speed, phase and other attributes can be controlled.
- Circular wave
- Radial waves around a center. Again, height, speed etc can be controlled.
- Drop wave
- Drop waves behave like circular waves of limited duration that are triggered by an event (e.g. something hitting the water). Different drop waves are triggered by different events.
- Manual/Single drop
- The user defines when and where a wave occurs.
- Rain (random drops)
- Waves occur randomly in time and space.
- Impact drop
- Detects collisions between objects and water. On collision, a wave is triggered.
- Bow wave
- Also detects the impact of an object, but generated waves from the object all the time. This makes for a great bow/stern wave effect.
Different purposes of usage
Besides from creating great water, Add-the-Sea can also be used to create landscapes. Using the coastmap-function, ATS can perform displacing in realtime. And unlike the Relief object it can handle several displacement maps instead of just one: You can arrange the maps and merge them as you like.
History
The old GUI of Add-the-Sea was always target of criticism, because it broke with many usability conventions and did not integrate into CINEMA 4D usability concept. Anyway, it has been well-known for its good results. The latest release, Add-the-Sea Reloaded fixes this issue and comes with a completely reworked interface that perfectly integrates in CINEMA 4D's GUI and hierarchical concept.
The plug-in Add-the-Sea has a long history with CINEMA 4D. The first version was published in times of CINEMA 4D R5, and was controlled using splines which the user had to draw himself. Nowadays, shortly after release of CINEMA 4D R10, Add-the-Sea Reloaded will be published.
