The Blender Conference is on this weekend. It’s a good time of year for Blender users to gather in both meatspace and online to talk about all things Blender.

I was procrastinating last night and playing with the Ocean, Dynamic Paint and Vertex Group modifier features.

The Ocean sim is a modifier that does one of two things: generate or displace. The generative flavour actually creates an ocean using the modified object’s rotation and position as a basis while the displacement version displaces the verts of the object being modified. The video above is a normal boring Blender torus subdivided a couple of times and then Ocean-displaced. It’s quite a pleasant effect. Very James Cameron’s The Abyss.

This has nothing to do with the first episode but I’m thinking of ways I can use the Ocean modifier in the second episode. This Ocean modifier also has nothing to do with the actual Fluid simulator which I haven’t looked into yet.

If you’d like to know more about Blender, the Twitter hashtag is #bcon13 and talks from the conference are being streamed live and archived on YouTube. As for me, I’m back to inventing languages as soon as possible.