Ocean Extension not rendering

[ben_hamburg]

Hi there,

I have a weird problem: I have to to a couple of Turntables for the same Boats/Sims I already did for a project, but for some reason they don´t render in ocean mode anymore.
I already tried merging one of the sims into a fresh scene, but the problem still persists.
Any idea whats happening here?
I think I deleted a couple of phoenix helper objects (the ones that get created when you add a PHX_Foam object), but other then that I don´t remember doing anything that could have caused this...

I´ll try to prepare a stripped down scene to send to support, but I thought I´d ask here first...

[Ivaylo Katev]

you mean the simulator is rendered, but not the ocean? is it looking like in cap mode?

[ben_hamburg]

Yes. It looks like Cap mode, even though ocean mode is selected.

[Ivaylo Katev]

this may be a bug, can you send a scene with single cache file?

[ben_hamburg]

Already sent it to support.

[Ivaylo Katev]

very interesting. seems like your camera is broken. you can see the blue line that usually connects the camera and the target have strange position. if you enable the mesh preview and hit render, the render mesh is available for exploring in the viewport, and it's visible that it is actually existing, but it is below the camera and is centered by the blue line. in general, delete the camera and recreate it

[ben_hamburg]

Ah, right, could have figured this one out myself, since the mesh is created during rendertime depending on the camera, it had to be that.
I need to make a turntable, so the easiest way to do that was to create 36 Cameras and rotate them around the center at 10 degree steps. This way I would have the mesh "frozen" at the first frame, because I didn´t want the fluids to be moving.
So i unticked "targeted" in the vray cam, moved the pivot to the center and then cloned it.
I don´t know if thats where it broke or if it was the camera batch rendering script I used to render it.

Either way, the setup is quite tedious, so if there was a way to have the sim only use one particular frame as input, I could just use one camera and animate it.
I´m pretty sure that should be possible, just haven´t figured it out yet...

Actually: Can I also turn of the animation in the ocean extension, but still have the wave displacement, so I could have a seemless turntable animation?

[Ivaylo Katev]

it may be also a bug in the way we obtain the camera position, i will make some tests with your scene.
freezing the simulation is quite easy - select in the input panel "direct frame" and select which frame you need to render. it will appear in the entire animation. of course you will need to freeze the ocean texture too, but this is even easier - just set zero wave velocity.

[ben_hamburg]

Well, this happend the first time, so I guess it would be a quite specific bug...
Thanks for the info though, that makes it way more comfortable!
Only problem will be foam and splash passes, I was thinking of using "force motion blur", but that won´t work in that case, so I´ll have to fake it in post.

[Ivaylo Katev]

why it will not work? the foam motion blur does not give in account the input mode, but when you mentioned it, the mb of the waves will not work, because the texture is frozen

[ben_hamburg]

Well, faking it in Post works well enough, I don´t really need motion blur on the waves and for foam/splash passes a simple directional motion blur that is animated does the trick and is easy to do, since the turntable only has 72 frames.