Good procedural bumps for water texture....

[mcvltd]

Hello all,

Just wondering if anyone can help me out a little. I'm try to create some really good sea water.

I've recently switched from Lightwave/Fprime to Max/Vray and have found that the standard procedural textures in Max aren't quite as plentifull as in Lightwave.

The ones I've found most useful are waves, noise, and speckle all added together using stacked up 'mix' materials.

But I'm just not getting the quality of bump that I can get from LW (see attached images).

Does anyone know of some good 3rd party procedurals that will slot straight into the material editor?

Thanks in advance,

Rob.

[davision]

Try using a cellular map. This if from memory -- but -- I think you'll want to turn on Fractal and swap the black and white colors (or use a negative bump map). Then play with the size and spread settings. I'm fairly sure that will get you started. I think you want to use Circular and not the Chipped setting.

[mcvltd]

Thanks davision, I'll go and have a play.

[super gnu]

you could also try smoke... again with the black and whites swapped...

[Dschaga]

don't waste time ...

http://www.worley.com/et/et.html

*g* better go with the originals!

[super gnu]

cool! ive been looking for extra procedurals for a while... somehow missed those..

[CCS]

Never seen those before....

So, how do they rate next to darktree?

[instinct]

i dont really like them to be honest....i'd prefer a decent Worley Noise implementation instead of yet another collection of presets based on worley noise...*sigh*

[mcvltd]

I've done a quick test with the cellular texture and have come up with very similar results to my original 'mix'material (rather odd...will post an image later) - will also give the smoke texture a try too.

I'd spotted those textures from Worley, but to be honest, wasn't that impressed. Perhaps they look better when applied to geometry?

Dark tree, on the other hand, looked like a serious bit of kit! Does anyone have any experience of dark tree and will the plugin work ok with vray?

Also found some stuff done by Scanline in Germany - implicit surface water - wow, now that's what I need. Looks beautiful too. Shame it's all in-house stuff though.

[instinct]

if you need only a surface then i'd suggest dreamscape

www.afterworks.com

comes with foam sim and ocean dynamics. pretty neat.

http://www.afterworks.com/gallery/animations/15/sea.wmv
http://afterworks.com/gallery/animations/16/stormy.wmv

Thorsten

[mcvltd]

Cheers Thorsten! Perfect!! Does it play nice with vray?

[instinct]

yep...there's some tricks and catches to keep in mind, but generally it works just fine

[mcvltd]

oooh... tricks and catches.... that doesn't sound so good. Are these the kind of tricks and catches that can add many hours onto a project?

[instinct]

nah, it´s just that dreamscape has it´s own sky/sun/clouds/lighting system...and that doesnt work in all circumstances with vray (obviously) but pretty much everything works fine...you can render it all using vray, there´s just some rare cases that might need tweaking.

Thorsten

[mcvltd]

Tried the dreamscape plugin demo (version2) and had loads of crashes. Given up on that now, but had a trawl through the forum and found some pretty useful stuff.

I'm nearly there - just got to work out how to get that displacedment water to stretch to the horizon!