not fully smooth water base surface

[Micha]

Oh, I don't saved the material, but you see the whole parameters of the procedural shader at my screenshot.

Right, no good water textures on a planet full of water. Also there is no procedural material at the material library which based on the special water shader, only perlin noise materials.

[Armada01]

Ah, ok, I never used procedural, didn't realize it were only numbers...

Exactly, all there seems to be is some blurred noise maps, like they started out rendering water 15 years ago... seems like time stood still in the mean time.

Given that there are programs like Phoenix and Realflow, wouldn't it be possible to extract a tiled bump texture out of there?

[Armada01]

When rendering the water based on the procedural texture in GPU mode, the waves structure disappears after initial sampling. In CPU mode they show rightly. Is that normal, procedural not working in GPU render mode?

[Micha]

It was working here. Are you using VfR4 latest version from some days before?

[Armada01]

V-Ray for Rhinoceros 6 4.00.02

Hard to say that is the latest version. On the chaosgroup download section it shows the latest (and only download )version is

V-Ray 3.60.03 for Rhino 6 ADV, which has a different naming.

I'd even say mine is more recent! confusing.... Doesn't Vray have some automatic update function. Or am I supposed to check in every so often and download the full program?

[Micha]

Same version here, but working. Maybe you got an error message at the progress window.

[Armada01]

With the progress window, you mean the line of text at the bottom of the rendering image in the frame buffer? Or is that a specific window I can call up from somewhere?

[Micha]

The full progress window can be opened at the right side.

[Armada01]

I get some messages in orange in the list:

Checking CUDA driver version: Installed driver version is newer than the latest verified one
Texture "/Sea - 1BF/Water" of type "TexWater" is not supported.

[Micha]

Right, the right driver is a little secret, well hidden and not simple posted at the latest versions announcements.

You find the discussion about it here:
https://forums.chaosgroup.com/forum/...90#post1042490

[georgi.georgiev]

Just to fill-in on the initial issue.

The render output here is due to a number of factors coupled with the Normal Displacement mode.

Generally, this occurs due to the way JPG formats are compressed. There are cases where 'banding' occurs, which affects the smooth transition of gradients. This becomes more evident when high displacement amount is used.

We have notified our developers about this and they are looking into it. Possibly an optimization will be devised, however, for the time-being 2D Displacement mode mitigates these effects.

[Armada01]

Even with the (rather big) texture map that I use now, and even when rendering in CPU mode with 2D displacement, there are till some facets visible on the water surface when the camera is near the water surface.

I guess this is a particular issue with a smooth sea/ocean since you will generally have a huge surface to cover with waves and to prevent patterning, you will need to have a reasonably big texture map to displace / bump the waves, while at the same time you might take camera views just above the water.... in these circumstances even the singular pixel of a 3000px image will become visible.

I don't know if this type of issue could be resolved by some sort of smoothing function (like an image pass that is applied on the sea within vray (and not on the texture itself)?

[georgi.georgiev]

The issue here is not related to the resolution of the texture, but rather the color depth. Blurring the image could minimize the banding effect, however, it is best to use a photo-editing software to get rid of it all together and save it with a greater color depth range.

[BStoneArch]

A little late to the party, but I had issues with my water having lines in it as well. My problem turned out to be the surface that I was applying my water texture to. The surface was "split" using the "intersect with model" command so that the surface had a weird shape. I created a new, flat, rectangular surface and applied the same water texture to it and it solved my issue.