BOSS Wave Solver attributes

Use the BOSS Wave Solver to create effects like ripples and wakes on a water surface.

To apply the solver, see Add and edit BOSS solvers.

Global Attributes

Enable: Turn off to mute the effect without removing it from the scene.
Start Frame: The first frame for which the solver has an effect.
Resolution X, Resolution Z: The resolution of the grid used for calculating wave heights. This also controls the resolution of the EXR files used for caching. Higher values allow for more detail, but take longer to compute and require more disk space for caching. Matching the aspect ratio of the mesh ensures even sampling with no squashing or stretching in either direction.
Decay Width: Controls the width of a region at the border of the domain where waves are suppressed. This avoids reflections from the domain border. The values represent a fraction of the mesh size, so for example, 0.1 means 10% of the mesh size along each border.
Decay Alpha: Controls the smoothness of the wave suppression along the borders of the patch. Values that are too high can cause visible artifacts.

Simulation Attributes

Gravity m/s2: The acceleration due to gravity. The default of 9.8 represents the strength of gravity at the earth's surface in m/s². Smaller values produce higher waves that move more slowly, and larger values produce lower waves that move more quickly. You can adjust this value to change the scale.
Friction: A damping factor for the wave speed. A value of 0.0 lets waves propagate freely, and a value of 1.0 dampens them almost immediately.
Ocean Depth (m): The water depth used to calculate wave motion. Waves tend to be longer, taller, and slower in shallow water.
Wave Height: A multiplier for the wave height. Use values between 0.0 and 1.0 to decrease the wave height, and values above 1 to increase it.
Use Horizontal Displacement: Displaces the mesh's vertices horizontally as well as vertically. This results in waves with sharper, less rounded shapes. It also produces caches that are suitable for vector displacement maps because there are offsets in all 3 axes.
Wave Size: Controls the amount of horizontal displacement. Adjust this value to avoid self-intersections in the output mesh.
Capillary Size (cm): The maximum wavelength of capillary waves (smaller, faster ripples that propagated by surface tension and can sometimes be seen on top of the larger waves that are propagated by gravity). Capillary waves are typically visible only at small scales and high resolution, so in many cases you can leave this at 0.0 to avoid unnecessary computation.
Time: The time at which to evaluate the wave heights. Normally this is connected directly to the scene time, but you can break the connection and use expressions or other controls to slow or speed the wave motion.

Foam Attributes

Enable: Generates maps representing foam when caching the solver's output. See Generate BOSS foam maps.
Foam Diffusion Rate: Controls how quickly foam spreads and diminishes.
Cusp Scale: Controls the amount of foam.
Cusp Min, Cusp Max: Specifies the range of cusp values where foam is created.
Use Speed, Speed Min, Speed Max: Limits foam creation to regions where the speed is in the specified range.

Cache Attributes

You can use the tokens <project>, <scene>, <object>, <influence>, <frame>, and <f> for defining cache folders and file names. You can also specify tokens using the csh style, for example, $frame.

When you save a cache using tokens, a copy of the fully resolved path is also stored in the scene and used for playing the cache back. This means that the path to the cache is not lost if you save the scene under a new name or in a different project. If you later rewrite the cache files, the current values of the tokens are used and the resolved path is updated.

Use Cache: Reads from the cache files instead of recomputing the effect as you play back.
Export Cache: Writes cache files as you play back. You can turn this on manually to continually overwrite the cache files as you play back and adjust values.
Cache Folder: The location of all cache files for the solver, including foam and velocity if used. Omit the final "/" character when editing paths manually.
Cache Name: The base file name for the main wave cache.
Cache Velocity: Create cache files for velocity.
Velocity Cache Name: The base file name for the velocity cache
Foam Cache Name: The base file name for the foam cache

Diagnostics

Debug

Sets the verbosity of messages printed in the Output Window.

0 = No messages.
1 = Error messages only.
2 = Error and warning messages.
3 = Error, warning, and information messages.