Please note:
Funding is now closed for Phases 1 and 2 of this project. We are hoping to open
a third round of funding, but are focusing now on finishing the current features
that have been implemented.
The Details
What are the exact details of this development project?
Because of the enthusiasm and support of the blender community, this project has
developed into a multi-phase development effort.
Phase 1 - The first phase was just to bring the old Ocean Sim tools into a
Blender 2.5 branch. The original quote was approximately $350, however it
took a little extra time due to the new issue of multithreading in Blender 2.5
Phase 2 - In this phase, we focused on ways to improve the tool,
specifically by creating an Ocean Modifier, and also decoupling the Ocean code
for easier re-use with other future tools such as the nodetree system. Early
work is also being done on improving the foam generation abilities using masking
and materials.
How much does this cost?
Estimating the development cost was eaiser at the beginning due to the modest
goal of port the original Ocean Sim tool. However as more financial support has
come in, we have set our sites higher for adding new features. With this comes
more experimentation and r+d to figure out how to deliver better effects, such
as foam generation. We will be applying whatever funds are donated towards
achieving as much as we can in a responsible and efficient manner.
What are the deliverables?
The final deliverables from this proejct will include posting the source code for
the 2.5 branch to the Blender Projects repository, as well as posting various OS
version of the build to GraphicAll.org.
Will there be any differences between the
original Ocean Sim and the new one?
Originally, the only difference was the FFTW library dependency used. It is
faster, and easier to use the current library included with 2.5 (used for the
smoke sim). This is a double precision library as opposed to the single
precision library used in the original Ocean Sim. The trade-off is a doubling of
RAM usage. I feel this trade-off is fair considering the reduction in cost for
development.
Now that we have moved into Phase 2, there are other differences, including
support for multithreading using OpenMP, decoupling of ocean code, and the
ability of the Ocean Texture to generate a Foam mask.