Ocean Surface Properties

[nistaani]

I'm amazed by what Phoenix can do and all within max. Hoping switching between several apps will become a thing of the past.

One thing I'm having trouble playing with is the look of the ocean surface. Specifically the height of the waves and the 'choppiness' thats found in other surface generators. Is it all achieved through the vray ocean surface material? I've tried copying an instance to the material editor and fiddling there but nothing seems to update - do you have to re-sim to see the changes?

Thanks for any help

[Ivaylo Katev]

i'm not sure that understand the problem, but as a start i will describe shortly how to setup a simple ocean in phoenix
- create a simulator
- open the liquid panel and enable the liquids
- enable the initial fill up
- simulate few frames
- open the rendering panel and enable the displacement
- set a PhoenixFDOceanTex into the displacement map slot
- drag the ocean texture (that in the displacement slot) into the material editor
- set some reasonable wind speed, let say 5 m/sec (15 feet/sec)
- render it, the waves should be visible
how to control their height and choppiness?
you can control the height directly or by the wind speed. i recommend to use the wind speed, especially if you create an animation.
the choppiness is controlled by the parameter called sharpness, perhaps we have to change the name

[nistaani]

Thanks Ivaylo, thats helped me with the wave height and sharpness.

In the submarine example file there is a water texture in the material editor. How/where is this applied to the ocean mesh?

Also the 'Ocean' value in the rendering tab - This is described as 'extends the mesh with infinite surface' however, changing this value results in what appears to be the height of the simulator sinking below the surface or above it. Is this value tied to something else?

[Ivaylo Katev]

the ocean texture is applied to the displacement, see the rendering tab.
the ocean option have a parameter left to it, this parameter is intended to equalize the level in the grid with the level of the infinite extension. in your case you have to decrease the value, because the level in the grid is below 50%

[nistaani]

Ah I see, infinite Ocean is either on or off with the value on the right as the equalizer.

I' still not clear on where the refractive water texture goes. I loaded PhoenixFDOceanTex into the displacement field and then moved this over to the material editor but I don't know where the vray material for water is being applied.

In the submarine example, the slot in the surface section is empty so I don't suppose it's there?

[Ivaylo Katev]

the water material is applied over the simulator, like all other renderable geometry

[nistaani]

Sorry should have at least tried that myself! Thanks

Do changes to the displacement texture require a re-sim? Specifically if you change the direction of the 'wind' does this need a re-sim.

[Ivaylo Katev]

no, the displacement is a post effect, does not require resim

[drosselmir]

Ivaylo,

I try to follow the simple steps you outline here in Maya and I can't get any result. I get 2 messages; "PhoenixFD Simulator - preprocessing displacement" and also then "//Warning: Unsupported texture PhoenixFDOceanTexture"

Are there any extra steps to getting this feature working inside of maya?

Maya 2014
Vray 2.30.02
Phoenix 2.10.10_23945

[ivaylo.ivanov]

Can you find phoenix.txt in C:\Program Files\Autodesk\Maya2014\vray\shaders\ next to desc.txt?

[drosselmir]

Eureka!

The way our install is setup here it has Vray in a different place than phoenix. I copied the phoenix.txt into the Vray/shader directory and now it works!

Thank you for the info!

Dave