Plugins + Scripts [ForgeLab] Sea Forge

Late in the day. The light has gone low and gold, and the sand is still warm from the afternoon in a way you can feel through your palms.

She comes up out of the water toward you, unhurried. The sea does not want to let her go: it runs off her in sheets, it climbs her calves one last time, the surface behind her is still ringed where she pushed through it. Every step she takes up the beach leaves a print, and the prints change as she comes: sharp and shallow in the wet band, then deeper and softer where the sand is dry and loose and gives under her.

She lies down beside you and the sand takes her. Not on top of it, into it: the beach sinks under her hips and her shoulders, the edge of the hollow slumps a little as it settles, and the shape she makes is the shape of her.

When she rolls toward you the sand comes with her. It is on her back, the backs of her thighs, packed dark and heavy where her skin is still wet, dusted fine and pale where she has dried. You reach over and brush her shoulder. Where your hand goes, the sand goes. She laughs and shakes it out of her hair, and for a second the air between you is full of it, catching the light.

Then a wave you did not see coming reaches all the way up. It slides under her feet and stops, lace-edged, and when it pulls back it takes half of her footprints with it and leaves a line of foam on the sand that will be gone by the time the sun is.

Tomorrow the beach will be smooth again. Tonight it remembers.

Now count how much of that we could never do before. The ground did not move: lie down on a CUA beach and you lay on stone with a sand texture. The sea never came up the beach and never took anything back. Nothing stuck to her, nothing fell off her, and your hand had never once changed what was on her skin.

The scene looks like a beach. It never feels like one.

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Sand, until now, was a CUA: a texture on a floor. This is a field: a layer of sand with a thickness, sitting on your scene's floor, that every part of a body pushes into.

• Prints where she touches, as deep as she pushes. Feet, shins, hips, the length of a thigh or a forearm. Dry sand gives about 7 cm under a foot; wet sand, packed by the sea, gives about 1.5 cm and holds a sharper edge. Nothing is stamped from a library. The mark is the body, where the body was.
• Then the sand does what sand does. The rim of a print slumps to the angle of repose, dry and wet at different angles; loose edges creep; the sharp shape she left goes soft the way it does on a real beach after a minute. Settling runs on its own clock, so a print an hour old and a print a minute old do not look the same.
• Lie down and the beach takes you. The whole body prints, not just the feet. Get up and the hollow stays, edges settling, until the sea reaches it.
• A beach, not a plane. It rises inland, falls seaward, undulates a little, and every one of those is a slider. Terrain relief off gives you a perfectly flat one if that is the shot.
• It reads as sand at every distance. Grain, glitter, the dark minerals, the broad wet sheen: the surface is built so that a close-up and a wide shot are both the same sand. Colour it, dry and wet, with two pickers.

The Empty atom is the beach. Put it where the action is rather than stretching the beach to reach the action: the sand is finest, and the prints sharpest, near its centre.

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Look at any beach and the first thing you read is not the sea. It is the line where the sand changes: dark and packed and shining below it, pale and loose above it. That line is what tells you where the water has been, and it is the thing a sand texture can never have, because it moves.

• The sea writes it. Every wave that runs up the beach leaves a band of wet sand behind it, and the wet climbs a little above where the water stopped, the way it does when sand draws water up into itself. The band is wherever the sea has actually reached, wave by wave, not a stripe you painted.
• And the sand remembers it. Wet sand dries out over the minutes after the water leaves, from the top of the band down, so a beach that the sea has pulled back from shows exactly how long ago it was there. Wetness memory is a switch; off, the band snaps to the water and forgets.
• Wet sand looks like wet sand. Darker, glossier, smoother: the grains pack, the surface loses its fine ripple, and it takes a sheen off the sky and your lights. Dry sand next to it stays matte and loose and paler. Two colours, two speculars, and the boundary is where the water decided it is.
• It changes what a body does to it. A foot sinks about 7 cm into dry sand and holds a soft edge; the same foot in the wet band goes in about 1.5 cm and holds a crisp one. Walk from the water up the beach and your own trail shows the change.
• And what it does to her. Sand from the wet band packs onto her skin dark and heavy; sand from the dry beach dusts on pale. SkinBeach reads the same wetness the beach does.

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The sea, until now, was a CUA surface you placed next to the sand and hoped nobody walked to the edge. This one is part of the same field. It knows where the sand is, the sand knows where it is, and the two of them keep a running account of who was where.

• The swash comes up the beach on its own rhythm, cusped along the shore the way real run-up is, reaching further on some waves than on others, and every wave leaves the wet band above described a little higher or a little lower than the last.
• It erases. Prints inside the wet band are worn down a little by every wave that crosses them. Walk along the waterline and watch the sea take your trail back, one wave at a time.
• Foam is a field, not a sticker. It is born where the wave breaks, carried in on the bore, left behind as lace when the water drains, and it dries on the sand or is picked up again by the next wave. It piles up where the water slows, exactly where foam piles up on a beach, and the front of it is never a hard line.
• When she is in the water, the water answers. Bubbles stream off her limbs and cling to her for a while, rings spread from wherever she moves, and a fast move throws a sheet of spray. Each is its own switch, and each is free when it is off.
• Swell, breakers, glitter, a horizon. The surface itself: rolling swell with a direction and a spread, breaker foam on the crests, sun glitter you can tighten or loosen, three colours from the shallows to the horizon, and a render queue slider for when it has to sort against glass.

Turn the sea off and the beach keeps its waterline and its wet band. You lose the water, not the beach.

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Sand does not stay on the beach. It gets on her, and it gets on her where she touched it.

• Contact is what sticks it. Wherever her skin goes below the surface of the sand, sand comes back up with it. The longer she stays, the more she carries. Nothing is painted on; it is the beach's own height field read against her body, so a shoulder that never touched the ground stays clean and the hip that took her weight does not.
• Wet skin holds it darker and heavier. Where she is still wet from the sea the sand packs into clumps and darkens; where she has dried it sits as a fine pale dust. The wet look is hers to tune: darkening, colour, how much it clumps.
• It is sand up close. Grains with a size and a relief, clumps with a scale, dust between them, lit by your scene's lights. Coverage is one slider if you want less of it.
• Clothing keeps it off. Scan what she is wearing once and covered skin stays clean, per item and per part, with a soft edge at the hem. Untick a wet T-shirt and it collects sand like skin does.

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This is the part you will keep coming back to, because it is the part that answers you.

• Wipe-off. Her hands, or yours, sliding over her skin take the sand with them. Brush her shoulder and the shoulder is clean where the hand went and sandy where it did not. In VR that hand can be your own. It is the first thing in this line where somebody else's touch changes what is on her.
• Shake-off. Motion sheds sand: a fast rise, a turn, a shake of the hair, and it leaves her, more from dry skin than from wet, which holds on. Leave it off while she lies in the sand collecting it, then switch it on the moment she gets up. That is a shot, and the switch is on the panel for exactly that reason.
• Airborne sand. What comes off her does not vanish. It becomes grains in the air, with weight and drag and the light through them, thrown in the direction the limb was moving.

The switches that are really directing handles

Everything above is an ordinary VAM storable, so all of it is a Timeline cue. The ones worth knowing by name:

• Shake-off ON at the frame she rises. Everything she gathered leaves her at once.
• Clear all marks (EnvBeach) between takes; Clear the sand off the skin (SkinBeach) likewise.
• Stamp the whole body now: she was posed onto the sand already lying there, and you want the beach to know it without her moving.
• Level the sand under the person: she lies on a slope and you want the beach flat where she works, and free to rise beyond her.
• Time of day: day, night, or your own. One dropdown moves the built-in light, the sky and the exposure together.

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1. Empty atom where the beach should be → EnvBeach. Sand, sea and surf are there. Rotate the Empty so +Z points inland; the shoreline follows.
2. Walk her onto it. Prints appear. Lie her down. The hollow appears.
3. SkinBeach on her. It finds the beach by itself. Sand is on her where she touched it.
4. Time of day on the LIGHT page, or leave it on custom and light it yourself. Name one or two of your scene's lights as Accepted light A/B and the sand takes their colour and their shadow.
5. Switch on Shake-off and Wipe-off when the scene has motion in it. They ship off because a beach where nothing has happened yet has nothing to shed.

Then wait for a wave. The beach is at its best after the sea has been over it once.

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• LumenForge SkyRay puts the sun over it: full-screen shafts cut by your palms and rocks, and cloud shadows drifting across the sand. The shot at the top of this page is the two of them together. EnvBeach's own built-in light and SkyRay's direction are set by eye to match, and a beach is where that takes ten seconds.
• SteamForge SkinWater on the same Person: water running down her, sand packing where it is wet. Two Skin plugins, one body, and both carry a Render queue slider for the order they draw in.

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Everything on this page happens from the beach looking out. The sea is a surface, and the camera stays above it.

That is a choice for v1, not the shape of the product. The same field that knows where the sand is and where the water reaches also knows how deep the water is at every point, and that is the floor of the next thing: going under. Light falling through the surface in moving shafts, the sand ripples on the bottom, her hair and the bubbles she trails up toward the light, and the sea seen from where she is instead of from where you stand.

No date, no promises. It is not finished and it is not being announced yet. But when the sea in v1 seems to stop at the waterline, that is where it stops, and this is why.

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• EnvBeach → add an Empty where the middle of the beach should be → Plugins → Add → EnvBeach.cslist. The beach appears around it, sea included.
• There is no beach asset. The whole beach is generated from that one Empty. No mesh to import, no prefab, no CUA to find, nothing to keep in sync: the sand, its relief, the waterline, the sea and the surf are all built in code at load from the sliders on the panel. Which is the point rather than a curiosity. A prefab beach is the shape somebody else chose; this one is whatever you set, and every one of those settings is a storable. Wider, steeper, flatter, a different waterline, a different sea, a different colour, at run time, from a trigger, halfway through a scene. You are not decorating a beach. You are specifying one.
• SkinBeach → select the Person → Plugins → Add → SkinBeach.cslist. It finds EnvBeach on its own. With no EnvBeach in the scene, set Sand height from to the manual slider and give it a floor height.
• Same grammar as the rest of the line. Env-plugins go on an Empty, Skin-plugins go on a Person, exactly like EnvFog and SkinWater. If you have used SteamForge you already know where everything is.
• Master Switch on every page, and one switch in front of each thing that costs: the sea, the foam, the bubbles, the splash, the ripples, the thrown sand, the relief. Off is off.
• Several people? Tick All Person atoms and everyone in the scene leaves prints, up to four. Off, it is the one you pick in the dropdown.
• Everything is a normal VAM storable, so every switch and slider is drivable from Timeline and triggers.
• Both plugins have a Copy report button. If something does not appear, paste that into the thread instead of describing it. It prints the version, what is bound, every gate, every control's current value and the live counts, and it usually answers the question in one message.

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A beach is a lot of screen. Sand fills the frame from the foreground to the horizon, and the sea fills the rest, so this is the kind of product that is easy to make expensive and easy to lie about. What follows is the data that drove the defaults, including the rows that are not flattering.

Every row below is marked. MEASURED is a reading off the bench. INFERRED is arithmetic on a reading: useful for planning, not a benchmark.

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HONEST NOTES & LIMITS
Up front about the edges, so nothing surprises you.

• This is a shore, not an ocean. A beach with a sea in front of it, seen from the beach. The sea is a surface with swell on it, not a volume: there is no underwater yet, and the camera is not meant to go below the waterline in v1. See Below the waterline above for where that is going.
• Prints come from the body's joints, not from every vertex. Twelve body segments, each a capsule between two controllers, print the sand: torso, head, thighs, shins, upper arms, forearms, feet. That gives a foot, a shin, a thigh, a hip, a forearm; it does not give individual toes or the crease of a palm. Up close the print is the shape of a limb, which is what a real one is.
• Thin sand and thin limbs. The sand is a layer with a thickness, 12 cm by default, on top of your scene's floor. A forearm pressed into 7 cm of sand reaches the floor underneath it, and VAM's floor is whatever collider your scene has there. Thicker sand (SAND · Sand depth) gives deeper prints; that is a slider, not a limit.
• Four people, and the body work is per person. All Person atoms tracks up to four; the rest are counted in the report rather than tracked. The bench was one person; see the numbers section.
• VR hands are a switch, and it ships off. With it on, the player's own hands print, throw sand and wipe her. On a desktop it does nothing and the report says so.
• A garbage collection about every 50 minutes in a scene that does nothing else, at a quarter of a second. Steady-state garbage, measured; not a leak, also measured. Most scenes never get there.
• Reject lights at the source edits your scene lights' culling masks. It is how the sand keeps every light but the two you named off itself. Do not combine it with another plugin that edits culling masks (Light Atom Excluder, for one); one of them will win and it will not be obvious which. Leave it off and both are fine.
• Transparent against transparent has no correct order. Sea against glass, thrown sand against the sea. Both carry a Render queue slider. Author's call, per scene.
• The Empty is the centre of the beach, and the beach is finest near it. Prints far from the centre, out in the backdrop sand, are coarser than the ones at her feet. Move the atom to the action.

Found something odd? Want something the beach does not do yet? Post in the discussion. This grew out of two whitebox probes and what the measurements said, and it will keep growing on what you report.

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v1.0

• Initial release. Two plugins. EnvBeach: sand that prints and settles, a sea that wets, foams and erases, surf that answers a body, day and night. SkinBeach: sand that sticks where she touched the beach, packs where she is wet, falls when she moves and comes off under a hand, with a clothing mask.
• Reviewed before release. Two independent code audits and a third-party read before this went out, an overnight bench at 8K, and a re-measure of the exact factory configuration. What they found is fixed or written above.

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Special Thanks

Thanks to @C&G-STUDIO for the ideas and encouragement!

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