Ocean material

[YoyoBoy]

I'm need to do an ocean soon. I'm wondering where I can find a good material/displacement for it. I've installed the Phoenix demo, but I'm struggling to make the ocean map in that work properly.

Thanks.

[Syclone1]

Check the Phoenix forum, there are some great example scenes posted of ocean water.

[joconnell]

So on the material side it's really easy - do you want to be able to see slightly under the water or not? If it's an infinite ocean out at sea and no coast line you can get away with using a falloff material in the diffuse with a dark blue for the flat glancing parts and a slightly greenish colour for the crests, then it's just full reflections with an interesting environment map. I kind of prefer using a falloff in the reflection slot rather than a colour and the fresnel setting as I'll often make the falloff curve more s shaped to get as much range from strong to nothing in the reflections. If you've got to see under it then full reflection, full refractions and use a blue or green in your fog colour and then play with the multiplier to get the right level of "see throughness" - remember that smaller numbers make it more transparent so try 1 to start, then 0.1, 0.01 and 0.001. For the displacement it can handle it all automatically based on the wind speed value in the ocean tex map, the only thing that's important is that you keep your scene to real world scale as otherwise the values will be a bit out of sync!

[alias_marks]

This was the bees knees back during max 9 - parametric tileable ocean wave geometry via modifier.

http://charles.hollemeersch.net/oceanwaves

Looks like he stopped developing it though. too bad, would be great to find an updated version of this.

[rusteberg]

here's one i started working on a while back..... the clouds are vray enviroment fog attached to a large bounding box with several layers of noise modifiers mixed together.... foreground teapots (top) are around 1 meter deep and the ones below that are about 6 meters deep...... this is an old wip, but the same holds true to reflection/refraction balance mentioned above. just gotta explore and play around with it.......

[Mokiki]

Peter Guthrie made some cool looking oceans a while back with the help of the phoenix ocean map. He also did a blend between two different ocean textures with varying strength to define "windpockets" (don't know if that is the correct term), which gives a pretty neat effect.
http://www.peterguthrie.net/blog/2014/8/seascapes