Rendering Ocean for 6k animation

[Turtle247]

Hi I have to do some animated ocean renders at 6656x1217 resolution with a spherical panorama and a camera at 150 FOV for a specail screen its going on and Im getting flickering towards the horizen. Im pretty sure it deals with the ocean Subdivs parameter the problem im having is Im caping out my ram at 6 ocean Subdivs and still get some flickering. I have 128gb of ram and its maxing it out. Im using the phxfd liquid sim box and simming the amount of frames I need and then putting the phoenix fd ocean texture in the displacement. I have to do it this way bc later I need to add slpashes for a boat in the scene. I have limted the flickering by adusting the phxfd ocean texture but lossing a lot of detail I wanted. Is there anything I can do to get the nice detail I want but when it gets close to the horizen make it not flicker like making the ocean mess less dense or smoothed out? I didnt know this but depending on your render size phx will adjust the ram needed to make that render. so I was doing test renders at half res and everything was looking good and ram was below 128 but once I was rendering at full res with all the same settings it capped my ram and my computer crashed pretty much.

If anyone has any suggestions please let me know may be using the fade volume options in the displacement section somehow? Im on version 3.10 sorry the still makes it look fine but animation theres flickering

[joconnell]

We were blending it off using a falloff map set to camera distance - might help? the same blend map was inverted and put into the glossy channel so you have sharp reflections close to cam broken up by the waves, softer reflections as you go to the horizon similar to what the ocean breakup would do.

[Turtle247]

So I made a falloff map and plugged it into the Highlight glossiness and Reflection glossiness and set it up so there is none of both in the horizon. My test render still came back with flickering and popping. So now im doing test with a falloff map and having a vraydisplacement on a plane for the horizon section of the ocean and then forground ocean is the ocean I have been using I seem to get pretty good results and able to make a higher looking detailed ocean as well.

Thanks for the reply and the help I think I just don?t have enough subdivs for my horizon to get rid of the flickering/popping Im getting.

[joconnell]

Oh sorry, I should have been clearer - if you try using the falloff map to mask the displacement too so it's gradually fading off to a flat plane that'll hopefully get rid of the geometry sampling and kicks. You might have to use the inverse curve to fade in the displacement as a bump instead so there's a similar feel or just use the falloff so that there's a blurrier reflection in the background too! I found doing an ocean horizon like this shot very heavy even when working at 2k so I know how you feel! The last film I did wasn't using vray and their solution was to render out some tiling ocean wave textures as image sequences and then have a set of individual polygons with displacement - the tessellation got gradually sparser as it went away from camera.

[Ivaylo Katev]

The problem with smoothing the mesh near the horizon is that it changes the color, it will become the same as the sky that looks weird. Actually the ocean mesher is very complicated just to produce as real as possible horizon appearance. The very first ocean implementation was missing this feature, you can see how it looked here