Phoenix horizon noise

[crimea]

Wanted to reply to here: https://forums.chaos.com/forum/phoen...mera-mouvement
but I can't.

I'm experiencing the same, and been trying to come up with settings that work (better), and although I have managed to alleviate the issue, it's definitely still prominent. Are there no possible fixes for this? Now for me or later by you guys? It's been around for so many years now. It works so well in the version I have with max 2014; v3.00.01. Currently on max 2019 and phx 4.41.00.

The best settings I've found are 0.5 horizon roughness, distance falloff in glossiness with far at 0.85, blinn brdf, and maximum ocean subdivs without running out of ram or rendering taking too long, which is usually 2.

I can share scenes and screens, but would think it was fairly straight forward to recreate, and not an unknown/difficult to understand issue.

Thanks!

[crimea]

No answer?

[crimea]

It would be really swell to get a reply, and maybe even a discussion going.

[rporter8555]

I know it has been over a year since your post, but I have a few questions. Does it make a difference which camera you use? VRay or Standard? Does it make a difference if you use HDRI or Sun?
Also, how do you set the falloff?
Many thanks!

[markus_s_cg]

I haven't found any solution other than rendering the ocean twice, once with the Phoenix simulator and second with a plane and vray displacement. Then I composite the Horizon in post. I wish they could implement something so the Phoenix simulator was using a similar method to Vray Displacement modifier (PS! It's just magic to me, I don't know how it works).

[markus_s_cg]

My thread regarding this issue. https://forums.chaos.com/forum/phoen...de#post1135362

[crimea]

I know it has been over a year since your post, but I have a few questions. Does it make a difference which camera you use? VRay or Standard? Does it make a difference if you use HDRI or Sun?
Also, how do you set the falloff?
Many thanks!

I have not noticed a difference.

Here's the falloff settings I ended up with for a very recent project. They don't have to be exactly these though. And, this is in meters, if your scene is in CM you will to multiply distance by 100.
https://i.imgur.com/YGPo9ol.png

Also, it's important to set brdf type to blinn instead of ggx, as ggx produces extra noise.

I tend to go with markus' doing an extra render with vray plane and comping on top method often, too.

[Joelaff]

To get smooth horizons raise the Ocean Subdivs as high as your memory will allow (start slowly, as you could easily use up all your RAM and have to force the renderer to quit.. and/or keep your eye on the Task Manager and get ready to stop the render or kill the process if it starts to use your memory. If I set this too high I can easily use all 512GB of RAM in my workstation! So do watch this.. Some recent optimizations in later builds (not sure when, but it was around April or May of this year I was pushing the Phoenix team for it, and they did it not that long afterwards) will only tessellate the ocean that is visible, reducing the memory footprint, but it still uses a ton of memory.

Once you get that as high as you can, if you still have problems (likely you will) then apply a falloff with camera distance (multiply) to reduce the displacement map at the horizon. Then use a similar distance falloff (could be falloff or VRayDistanceTex, though I think I had better results with Falloff (Falloff being the Max node for this-- use whatever is native to your DCC if not Max) for some reason) to reduce the glossiness of the water at a distance to prevent too many little pings that turn into fireflies.

In order to get nice distant pings we use another noise map (clamped so the white parts are small relative to the black areas - In Max this means a min value of around 0.8 and a Max around 0.9). Render this with a VRayExtraTex to get a noise on the water that can be blended in comp (also choked or spread if needed), and add highlights/bokeh to these pings.

I think we ended up using horizon roughness in the 0.3 to 0.5 range. much lower and it looked too flat.

Hope this is helpful.