how to map textures onto water sim surface

[ttdww]

Am doing a large ocean sim and looking to optimize render times by adding some textures to water sim surface. 2 questions actually:
--How to map the PFDoceantexture onto the surface as a bump map to distort the reflections - so like the displacement map mode within the simulator, but to speed things up, just want to affect the bump map of the water shader.
--How to map any other standard texture or bitmaps onto the surface. I've been able to do it by adding a UV planar map onto the simulator, but this acts more like a projection - would be great if the texture distorted with the waves stretching back and forth.

Thanks in advance!

[Svetlin.Nikolov]

Hey, if you mean to add more detail to the Phoenix ocean displacement using these textures, you could plug them into the scaling slot of the ocean tex in the material editor or combine them using a comp tex. Otherwise, the simulator's mesh is just a regular Max mesh, so you can add modifiers on top of it, or you can modify the V-Ray material in any way you want.

Cheers!

[ttdww]

Hi Svetlin,

Thanks so much for the ideas. What would you mean by 'scaling slot' of the ocean tex - do you mean the PFDoceantexture? If so, is there a place to wire up to the scale? That would be cool. What I'm really trying to achieve is to use the PFDoceantexture in the bumpmap of the water material, and not do any displacement, leaving the simmed water mesh as is. Would that be possible? Thanks!

[ttdww]

Visually, I'm trying to add the smaller surface waves seen in this sample onto my larger stormy ocean waves sim, but only into the shader - I'll settle for just affecting the reflections using the bumpmap (without foam). I'd like to have the bump warp with the mesh velocities though, which is something I'm unclear how to wire up. Similar to how this texture stretching is done: https://vimeo.com/46413794. I guess that's 2 questions. Thanks again.

[Svetlin.Nikolov]

Hey,

Yup, I meant the Displacement Scaling slot in the ocean tex: https://docs.chaosgroup.com/display/...Tex-Parameters However, for this to work instead of bump, you might need to boost the Ocean Subdivs since it would actually be an actual generated mesh carrying this additional detail. It would still happen at render-time, like the material approach, but in case it's not detailed enough, you'd need more Ocean Subdivs and this would eat up more RAM.

If you want to plug the ocean tex itself as a bump into a material, I think this won't work, since we never implemented it specifically and it could work only by chance. We have logged this feature years ago, but since nobody ever asked about it until now, it's at the bottom of the priority queue.

When my colleagues are back on Tuesday (it's a national holiday here today and tomorrow), we'll try to set it up - if it works out, it would be a good example..

Cheers!

[ttdww]

Right! I see it now - displacement scaling. I'm fine with using more ram - 192G on this station, however I think this is describing the displacement approach, yes? Trying to avoid render-time displacement since the xforming stage is putting the delivery of this 4k stormy ocean at risk. Getting much faster frame times if somehow I could do it all in the shader (warping the reflection that is).

So regarding being able to use the ocean tex in the shader (like for a bump map), that'd be fantastic! I was trying all sorts of ideas to map it - uv, world space, but as you mentioned it just didn't seem to work. I resorted to 'cellular' but it just doesn't look as good as I know the ocean tex could since it's an XYZ (rgb) vector - that's guessing it could be implemented that way. Yet even if it could only be mapped in XY, that'd be an improvement, though I noticed my cellular didn't really match up with foam sliding.

By the way, the above 'quick-render-time add detail' attempt is coupled with my other post about trying to use the older multi-pass to sim the ocean - it was helping give me smaller little waves on top of the larger ones. If we can get this shader idea working above, maybe I'll stay with FLIP which does the larger ocean waves great and I'll get the droplet surfing that I need. The client request was to get huge storm swells without the waves breaking too much. Took a lot of sim RnD with just enough wave force, but I've got that part nailed. Problem now is just that the 'large' feel isn't there as the stormy swells are too smooth. With little time to RnD further, and even if I could get there with FLIP, I'm guessing my voxel size would have to be incredibly low to get those little waves. I've got 1800 frames to run. Aaaaaaah ;D Thanks again Svetlin!

[ttdww]

I've been thinking.. (uh oh). If your team is able to do anything with implementing oceantex being able to plug into the bump of a material, it would awesome if the foamtex could also be rolled into that as well - woohoo! Ok, perhaps asking too much. Was just thinking that if we can affect reflections in the shader using oceantex, would also be great to be able to map on some foam at the edges of those faked in little waves. If not, it's all good. Thank you either way!

[georgi.zhekov]

Hey,

If you plug the Ocean Texture or the Foam texture inside of VRayColor2Bump texture and then plug it in the bump slot - it should work as expected.

Cheers,

[ttdww]

Thanks Georgi! Will give that a try. Figured there might be some way to wire it up.