Ocean skyline noise

[Ivaylo Katev]

ok, start from scratch
1. create the plane,
2. add the displacement modifier
3. create the texture
4. set wind speed 3 m/sec
5. set sharpnes=0.5
6. set coherence=0
this is all for the texture, let all the other params by default
now, the displacement
7. make it vector displacement
8. make the limits +- 1000
make the edge length 32
9 place the camera about 5 meters above the water for good view

this is all

[stevesideas]

did you change the vray displacement amount parameter? i noticed in your screenshot that it is 1m, and you said that your scale is inches, that means you have 40 units displacement, not one
this parameter is a bit misleading. it is actually a multiplier, not the final displacement size. and you mentioned that you are using the wave height, not the wind speed. for easy use of the texture i recommend to use only the wind speed parameter to control the wave size, not the height!

Okay thanks..this seems to be producing much better results but am I correct in thinking I cannot get the results as in your displacement method because I have no crest control ? Here is the updated version...looking a lot better but I really could do with those crests. They really take the ocean a major step forward in terms of realism.

If I'm using windspeed to control the size of the waves will this affect the animation or can I just adjust the velocity parameter to get the speed I require ?

[Ivaylo Katev]

yes, it's good to update, but here i think the difference comes from the sharpnes. what sharpnes you have? i wrote by mistake zero, and changed it to 0.5 few minutes after that, but may be you are using zero?

[stevesideas]

Even with 0.5 sharpness I do not get any crests. I'll make sure I have the latest phoenix nightly although I thought I did have it: 2.1.1 24386

[stevesideas]

Here is the result with 0.5 sharpness - not really much difference. I do have the latest nightly version of Phoenix installed.

[stevesideas]

Is it possible someone can take a look at my scene. I see on vimeo that others are managing to get nice crests on the top of the waves. I really cannot see what I'm meant to do.

[Ivaylo Katev]

this is already up to the render setup, there are no violations.
the white spots are caused by the high edge size, try to decrease it until the render times are acceptable. btw i just fixed the sharpnes difference between phoenix and vray and tomorrow they must produce equal result sharing the same texture

[Ivaylo Katev]

just for case i did a small test from scratch
the sharpness here is 0.9 because as i said the vray and phoenix displacement difference was fixed

[stevesideas]

Thanks for this ! This is a great help.

[stevesideas]

Thanks for all your help today. I'm getting some really nice results now. The only issue is the edge length trade-off with the white lines on the wave crests. Is anything going to be done to resolve this issue without having massive render times because you have to decrease the edge length.

[Ivaylo Katev]

there is no perfect happiness

[jstrob]

the last 6 months we did multiple changes in the skyline rendering trying to make it smoother and faster. i suppose you are just using an old build.
currently it should look like the attached images
i made two images with subdivs 2 and 5
the triangle count of subdiv 2 was 11M, the total render time was 150 sec, where 25 sec were spend for the mesh build and 125 were spend for the rendering
the triangle count of subdiv 5 was 27M, the total render time was 190 sec, where 60 sec were spend for the mesh build and 130 were spend for the rendering.
and beside this you have additional option to use vray displacement with a plane.
the third image was made by wray displacement with 32 pixels triangle edge, the render total time was 240 sec, can't split it because vray calculates the displacemnt render time. you have to increase the edge, because the default value 4 is very slow. you have also to use half sharpnes of the texture to have the same result as phoenix (this may desire our attention it shouldn't be like this).
the triangle count was only 700k, that is very low compared to the phoenix displacement.

Hi Ivaylo, I am trying to remove the noise in a a ocean animation. It looks kind of your 2 first image in that post. But once animated the noise is dancing too much. It seems that with a plane and vray disp it could be a lot better. But I also have a sim inside of that ocean. Is thee a way to insert a sim in a plane with vray displacement?

[jstrob]

I made an animated render with a normal plane and vray displacementmod and with the same ocean texture, there is no dancing noise. But with phoenix ocean it seems impossible to remove the noise on the horizon. Do you think you could fix this?

[Ivaylo Katev]

it's not easy to fix this, vray displacement works in completely different way, it calculates the normals render time, we use precalculation and interpolation of the normals. it's planed to add option change of the method, but it's not simple and will be not added for this release. we consider this a low priority task, because you can just disable the displacement of our mesh and add vray displacement, no need to add a plane, render in ocean mode. with flat extension.

[jstrob]

it's not easy to fix this, vray displacement works in completely different way, it calculates the normals render time, we use precalculation and interpolation of the normals. it's planed to add option change of the method, but it's not simple and will be not added for this release. we consider this a low priority task, because you can just disable the displacement of our mesh and add vray displacement, no need to add a plane, render in ocean mode. with flat extension.

Ok we can just add a vray disp mod on the PhoenixFD mesh! Fantastic!!!