Rowboat Animation

This is an animation of a rowboat floating on an Ocean. I love animation and this is just a perfect project for me, it probably is for you to.

You will need to have an animation software like Autodesk Maya or Blender.

You will need to make an object that can float on the water. I downloaded a rowboat off of Sketchfab. You can make one. I saw some people make a life preserver out of a torus and the just texture painted it. Here is the FBX file for the animation. I got the HDRI from Poly Haven. The one I got was an Ocean one that I made not only the lighting, but the background.

You're going to need to make an Ocean Modifier on a plane to make the animation realistic. You just need to make a plane and then add the Ocean modifier and change the resolution high for a more realistic your ocean is. You can also make waves. You will need to go into shader editor and change the color to blue and the roughness to a low value. You can then scale the ocean to your desire.

You will need to make another plane that is on the middle of the object that you want to float and scale it to make the whole object covered. Then you will need to select the plane and add a shrinkwrap modifier for the plane. Then go into edit mode for the plane and make a vertex group for the whole plane and assign it. Then select the object you want to make float and add some contraints. Add a Copy Location Contraint and a Copy Rotation Constraint. Set both of the target objects for the plane that we made the shrinkwrap modifier on. Add the vertex group to the one we made. If the object is flipped around you can deselect any axis and just play with it.

This is what the "Finished Product" is. The reason I put the quotations around "Finished Product" is because it is not finished. It looks a little ugly. Good, but ugly. I need to add some foam to the waves and slow down the animation.

This is how I feel right now. I feel sank. this is not good enough so I need to add a longer animation and zoom out to catch the whole oceans' beauty right now.

This is my boat. I am not finished. The 3d Cursor looks like a Life Preserver though. I need to animate the Camera some more.

You should add audio to make the scene more realistic. I did, I got the audio online.

You should edit your scene and add audio and effects. You don't have to but I did.

We finished! We're done, now you can brag to your friends and show them this Instructable. Here is the finished product.