Ship in a Bottle
Concept
This piece is inspired by the classic "Ship in a Bottle". Using a Houdini ocean spectrum to drive a flip sim and boat animation I brought to life my version of this age-old ornament display.
Ocean Breakdown
I needed to create a body of water that functioned like a full open ocean but it also had to appear small so I was out of control in the bottle. Once I had something that looked right I pulled a single point from the geo and parented the boat to that point. After bit of cleanup, I had my boat animation and ocean movement.
Flip Breakdown
I used the ocean spectrum, that I created for the boat animation, to drive my flip tank. The only collider in the flip sim is my animated boat, I had very quickly realized that trying to use the bottle to contain the simulation was way too heavy and required a ridiculous amount of pre-roll. So with only the boat in the sim, I got my ocean to react to the boat and was able to generate white water but it wouldn't fit in the bottle in this state. In order to remedy this I used the bottle's interior as a volume cut out and removed everything outside my bottle, leaving me with the perfect amount of water inside.