Sea water with bump maps

[jsr]

I am trying to get a realistic looking sea surface. The geometry is very simple so I want to use bump maps for waves.

The problem is that bump maps get very noisy in the horizon. In VRay material there is no texture filtering options that could be used to smooth the sea surface far away.

I could use Standard material and VRay map for reflections. But the I don't have the fresnel option in the map that is needed to make realistic reflections on water surfaces.

The only solution I have found is to mask the bump map with falloff map but I don't think this is an ideal solution.

So, any ideas?

[Dynedain]

you could add depth of field so the stuff on the horizon is blured out

[flipside]

I do think that mixing it with a folloff is the ideal solution. Maybe add a haze to the horizon to cover a bit of the noisiness.

[winberg]

Actually if you try to blend or fade the bump strength with a distance faloff map, you can get rid of most of the noise in the horizon...

Play around with the distance settings for best results..

-Tom