AURORA WATER

Creating realistic 3D pools, lakes and oceans inside After Effects is suddenly plain sailing

It’s been nearly five years since the arrival of Digital Anarchy’s Psunami, a reworking of Areté’s Digital Nature Tools, which enabled compositors to generate realistic oceans right inside After Effect’s render pipeline. But despite its age and several annoying limitations, it remains at version 1.1, and has left the door open for a new contender, in the shape of Aurora Water.

A partner plug-in to Aurora Sky, this tool takes a different approach. Where Psunami generates a ‘real’ 3D mesh and renders it, Aurora Water produces only the illusion of rippled water, using bump mapping and reflections. So while it’s therefore limited to calm oceans and lakes, it does provide some useful functionality over its aging competitor.

The plug-in features cubic reflection mapping, which can utilise a basic, user-defi nable sky as created within Aurora Water itself; it can import and reflect scene information from Aurora Sky, or it can base its reflections on ‘Boundary Layers’ created and imported separately. This latter option throws up some intriguing possibilities in terms of tying it into existing scenes – especially with cubic sky maps rendered by 3D software.

But even better, Aurora Water enables you to place up to four separate layers within the scene itself, and to have those layers reflected in the water, receive caustic reflections, and also reflect the surrounding sea and sky.

And because it can use After Effect’s own 3D camera and world co-ordinates, you can toggle each layer into a 3D object and then position them within the scene using the standard controls. Naturally, alpha channels are supported for cut-outs and text.

Like Psunami, this program supports texture and displacement mapping, but it goes one step further by automatically creating surface disturbance, either from a source layer intersecting the water, or from a point source, such as a pebble or rain drops. It also allows the camera to go underwater for shots of the rippling surface above, and can be accompanied by ‘God rays’, the shafts of volumetric light caused by sunlight piercing the waves.

Where Aurora Water works differently to Psunami, it too has its pros and cons. The ability to reflect both the environment and layers in the scene no doubt makes this a much more useful tool for scenes that don’t just involve rolling seas. Conversely, the main drawback is that Aurora’s water is totally flat, so it’s really only suitable for Mediterranean seas, millponds and pools.

Aurora Water is nicely integrated into After Effect’s 3D space, and solves many of the problems encountered with Psunami – which requires a lot more work to convincingly add other elements. In truth, though, the ideal plug-in would be one that employed the best facets of both.

Ultimately, Aurora Water is one of those plug-ins that you’ll either fi nd use for or discard as a novelty, and if it’s the former, Digital Element has certainly put effort into making it a tool worth investing in.

[tags]Aurora Water[/tags]