Does anyone know of any good tutorials showing how to make good boat wakes in Max without Reactor. Also how to make the spray and foam from the boats. You look at animations like “Who to Train your Dragon” when the boats are gliding through the water making wakes, foam and spray. Is it all Particles or are there more tricks that other people do to get the same effect? Any comments or tips would be great.

D.R.
3ds Max 2011
Autodesk Inventor & AutoCAD
HP xw8600 Workstation
Windows XP Pro 64Bit
Dual Intel Xeon 2.83 E5440 GHz
8.00 GB of Ram

I was able to make boat wakes using this tutorial: http://www.offsetnull.com/3ds-max/creating-buoyancy-without-reactor/

The tutorial uses the Follow_Surface script, which can make motion kind of hectic. However, you could use the techniques on that blog to form the wakes and just animate the boat by hand.

It doesn’t address foam, though. For that, you’d need PFlow or maybe animate a texture map to reveal frothier water.