Any tips to avoid dotted look on ocean foam?

[jstrob]

Hi,

I am creating a beach scene right now and I would like to have a few tips about how to avoid too many isolated dots on my foam when the camera is close to the surface. I know I can increase the pattern strength. Any other tips? thanks

[Svetlin.Nikolov]

Hey!

Off the top of my head, you could also bump the count multiplier in the Particle Shader so that you'll get more particles at render time. How does it look right now?

Cheers!

[jstrob]

Hi Svetlin, sorry but I can't show what I'm working on so I would have to create an example to show you. But it looks a bit like this example but with a bit more single dots on the water:
https://vimeo.com/207069832

Also my camera is closer above the water so the single dots really look like points. So I will try increasing my pattern strength and play with the amount of particles to try to avoid too many single dots.

[Svetlin.Nikolov]

Yup, this should be the way - try the patterns, the count multiplier on the particle shader and eventually you can also tweak the point size in the particle shader as well. In addition, you could use whitewater shading with Phoenix - I have an example scene and I'll try to record a video shortly - at the moment it's a bit more complex to setup than I'd like, so I was hoping I can make some changes and make it more presentable first

Cheers!

[jstrob]

whitewater shading? interesting. Please send me your example scene as soon as you can! And I just bought a pack of 5 phoenixfd sim licenses so I can do more tests now!

[Svetlin.Nikolov]

Sure! Here is the scene, but I need to fix some artifacts that appear during vorticity interpolation - hope we'll have the fix in the coming nightlies:

whitewater shading.zip

[Svetlin.Nikolov]

Basically the idea is to have two overlapping simulators - one simulating the liquid and rendering it as a mesh, and another one loading the caches and rendering them as smoke. The smoke sim uses the vorticity channel from the liquid sim, exported via the "Special" channel into the smoke channel. It also uses the liquid simulator as cutter geometry so that the rendered smoke stays strictly inside the liquid volume. And finally - the liquid simulator has "exclude fire/smoke sims" enabled in its interaction rollout, so that its simulation is not disturbed by the cache loaded in the fire/smoke sim, and so you wouldn't get a circular reference by trying to explicitly add the fire/smoke sim in the exclude list because it already points to the liquid sim by using it as a cutter.

I'd really like to separate a new node - much like the particle shader node, but containing the volumetric shader, and another node for the mesher too. This way you'd be able to have a single cache loaded with several shader types connected to it and you won't have to worry about dragging two overlapping simulators around in the scene

[Paul Oblomov]

For those, who don't use m18, max14 version.

[Svetlin.Nikolov]

Thanks, Paul!

[flipbook]

If you dont want to go down the 2 sim setup then you could just use the grid tex in an extra tex element (just include phoenix) and shade the refraction pass in comp. That's what I've been doing recently anyway There is an issue when using ocean mode though. Outside the grid will act like it has no UV's and just be massive streaks of white. Anyway it is just another method

[jstrob]

ok thanks very interesting!

[jstrob]

@flipbook: what channel do you use in your grid tex?

[jstrob]

Hi svetlin, in you r technique how do you tell the liquid sim to export its vorticity in the smoke channle. I can see how to tell it to export the special channel with vosrticity or vorticity smooth. But how does it know to export in it in the smoke channel? is done by default?

[Svetlin.Nikolov]

Ah, sorry about that that - the Smoke and the Special channels are aliased since there is no Smoke for FLIP and no Special channel for Fire/Smoke - they are one and the same at the moment.

[jstrob]

ok thanks Svetlin.