Water, water everywhere and not a ripple in sight

A small 'how-to' tutorial showing one way to add ripples to a surface without using postwork, when
using Daz Studio.

I'll be using Daz Studio 4.6 but the principles will hold good for DS3 as it will be using the in-built
Dform tool.

Why ripples? Apart from the obvious 'why not?' it is something that cropped up when someone
submitted an image to a deviantART gallery I help run. Since I have already done a couple of
tutorials I asked if they'd like one dealing with working with Dformers to provide ripples. Since
you are reading this I will give you three guesses as to their reply – and the first two don't count ;)

Back to the 'why ripples?' question – well, it can add a level of realism to a render: it is not often
that you can, for example, sit or stand in a liquid and not perturb the surface. Those perturbations
flow outward away from what caused them in the shape of ripples. So, we will try and provide
some ripples, and by doing them within the render itself by modifying the surface/material we can
also achieve additional effects.

What I will be working with is a basic figure (in this case it will be a base Genesis) and a water
plane (which will be supplied by a DAZ primitive plane). The Genesis figure will be posed in a
sitting/reclining pose and the DAZ plane positioned to give ample opportunity for requiring ripples!

So to make a start let us see what we will be working with:

Here we have the Genesis loaded, posed and a basic material applied. You may also be able to
make out the plane primitive loaded at 'ground level' We'll be doing something about that in a
moment!

If we move the plane upward, we get:

By the way, I created the plane as being 2m square and with 24 divisions.

We will now head off to the Surfaces tab to start giving the plane a bit of a watery feel:

I added a couple of Distant Lights to make the changes a little more obvious. One 'main' light with
ray-traced shadows, and one specular only, parented to the main light and set them to shine into the
scene at a slightly oblique angle.

We therefore end up with a base state as follows, with all components but the Dformers in place:

With this as the base, let's make a start on playing with the Dform tool to see what we can do.

Before we get any further into this, due to the flexibilty and customisation options you have with
the Daz Studio user Interface and layout what you see will almost certainly not look like what I
have!

Now, let's kick things off with the first Dformer. There are (to my knowledge) two ways of creating
a Dformer, both leading to the same thing. First is the menu option: Create> New Dformer… or
there is the Dform tool/tab.

Regardless of which route you go, you must have selected the root node of the item to which you
wish the Dformer to affect, and it must have geometry (logical, if you think about it!), so you
cannot, say, use a Dformer on a light.

Method 1 – The Menu:

At which point we get prompted to give the Dformer a name:

I try and give them a meaningful name, just in case I end up suing more than one, such as in this
case. A list of Dformers called D-Former_1 to D-Former-3 is not going to help me any!

So, in this case, part of the naming process is also deciding what aspect of the ripples we will be
using this Dformer for. Let's make a start with the easy one – the right arm, as it is nicely isolated
as it enters the water.

Method 2 – The Dform tool/tab

You can find this in two ways, either by the Window> Panes (Tabs) menu or via clicking on the icon
in the toolbar, when available.

We want, unsurprisingly, the Create New... option, which leads us to a familiar place:

The main difference between the two methods is that with using the Dform tool/tab method
(Method 2, above), the tab, as you might expect, stays visible on screen.

As we want to make use of some of the other options available we will use Method 2 (the screen
shots may, or may not, show the Dform Tool dialog – and if not it will only because I have moved it
out of the way so I can see the viewport unimpeded).

Back to the creation process, we will give it the name rArmRipple (sort of a token nod toward the
DAZ naming standards, where symmetrical objects get labelled with a r or l prefix).

Note two things here: the plane which was a simple object now has the little arrow against it's name
to show that it has child nodes and that in the viewport we can see a red-lined sphere (one part is
ringed in the screen capture above).

If we expand the plane now, we see:

Click on the _Field entry and we see, by default, a group of coloured dots that indicate where and
how strongly the Dformer will have effect.

At this point we have a terminology issue! The Dformer is made up of three items – the
NAME_Base item, which has the NAME item as a child and the NAME_Field item at the same
level as the NAME_Base. When referring to these I will (try!) to call the NAME_Field item 'Field',
the NAME item 'Dformer' and … I tend not to use the NAME_Base item, but if I do I will call it
'Base'.

You can change the appearance of the field by selecting the Dformer and looking at the Parameters
under the Posing tab:

As you can see the colour indicating the minimum effect is yellow whilst the colour indicating the
maximum effect is red. This is a graduated scale, so orange will indicate a moderate effect.

I tend to leave things at their defaults, but feel free to play!

Going back to the last but one image you can see that the Field will affect the entire surface of our
plane, with most effect at the centre and less at the edges. This is not what we want!

So, the first thing we will need to do is shift and adjust the area of effect of the Dformer. With the
Field selected we will need to go to the Parameters tab and start 'tweaking dials' – but fear not, it
will not be all at random!

As things stand, the Field has the following Parameters:

We will want to reduce the Scale and also adjust the X and Z Translate properties, to move the
centre of effect to the right arm. First the Scale. This will need to come down by quite a way; you
can either drag the pointer or click on the – symbol to the left of the scale or type a number in
directly after clicking on the percentage amount. I really recommend not using the + and – symbols
as life is too short!

The display of the filed is dynamic so you will be able to see it change it's area of affect as you
adjust the Scale. Depending on how much in the way of ripples you want I'd suggest a value of
around 2,500:

As you can see 'all' we now seem to have is a few yellow dots peeking out from around the Genesis
figure. Now we have the Scale bout right we can put the Dformer in a better position. You can
either use the X and Z Translate Parameter sliders or by using the Universal tool (as you can see I
have, by the green, red and blue arrowed box in the viewport) you can drag the Field into location.

I used the Translate in Z and X corner selector (you can just make it out in yellow to the right):

I am not sure if you need this next step, but it is one I tend to do anyway … With the object we are
affecting with the Dformer selected, I click on the Add Node(s)... button, and from the list of
Dformers shown, select the one(s) I have just added, and click Accept:

As it stands the Dformer, whilst having an area of effect and a location in which to apply that effect
is doing nothing. What we need to do is apply Transforms to the Dformer (X, Y and Z Translates,
Rotates and Scales). Using Translates will have the underlying mesh of the object deform in that
direction, according to the strength of the Dformer. Likewise Rotates will 'skew' the mesh. Scaling
will alter the area/shape of effect.

The good news is you can play around with the settings to you heart's content safe in the knowledge
that if it all goes horribly wrong you can delete the NAME_Base (along with it's NAME child) and
NAME_Field items and the object will change back to it's original shape!

So, have a quick play – the most obvious one here is to use the Y Translate and the effect you
should see is a mound (or depression) getting bigger or smaller as you move the slider about. All
very good and all that but, again, not what we want!

Here we go back to the Dform tab and use the Edit Spline... option:

What we want to do here is click on the Insert radio button and add in a couple more points by
clicking on the line on the graph:

Here I have added three new points. But we still have a simple curve, so we go back and select the
Move option, click on one of the points and keeping the mouse button depressed drag it up or down:

You can also move the end points. We now have a 'ripple' effect, so let's see how that affects things.
Click Accept and have another play with the Y Translate for the Dformer.

The first thing I noticed was how jagged the ripples seemed to be, so I did two things: first I
increased the general Scale of the Field to 3,000% and I also converted the plane to SubD to help
smooth things out (I believe I could also have used a higher number of Divisions when creating the
plane to the same effect.

After doing those we end up with:

All that is needed now is a Ripple producing Dformer for the lower legs (here I'd be inclined to
combine them into a single Dformer and have the X and Z Scales different, plus one more for a
combined body and thighs Dformer as we will be getting interference patterns which should, with
luck, mask the slapdash approach taken! :)

One of the problems we are getting is the basic, underlying, square mesh of the plane, which is way,
perhaps, I should have gone for more Divisions to start with to help make the Dforms look
smoother and less blocky.

After a very quick (and nasty!) application of tow more Dformers as suggested above I ended up
with the following render. It does, I admit, look ugly. It is not supposed to be fine art, it is
supposed to show the sorts of things you can do, and the process required. Obviously you would
take a little more effort with your own work. Also, additional geometry in the render, such as walls,
a container (such as a bath), better lighting, would all go a long way of improving things.