Good Ocean Texture/Material

[Morne]

Hi all

I'm looking for tips on making a ocean texture. In the past I've had some success with just a bit og noise on top of noise, but now I need something more realistic, except water doesnt really need to be refracted, so looking for somehting I can just apply to a plain.

Maybe some displacement? Anything standard I can use that comes with max or vray, or would I have to download some maps somewhere? Some kind of fancy mechanism or maybe height map suggestions for foam on crests and where it meets other objects? VRayExtraTEx?

any tips?

[joconnell]

Depending on what you need in ters of a flat versus a swelling ocean, you'll need 3 levels of noise. The first large one is for the rolling waves and can be done using a displace modifier on your plane with an animated texture. The second is the sharp crests which you can do with a vray displacement and a smoke or noise map tweaked to give you nice sharp crests, and the last level of noise is a bump in the material itself. Use a falloff for your colour channel so you can change between blue for the flat sections of the wave and a green colour for the peaked parts. Use a falloff in your reflections too and tweak the curve heavily to get the best reflections. You don't even really need to light the sea - a lot of the time it's reflections and a nicely tweaked falloff curve will do a good job of showing off it's shape and detail. You could also try using a vray dirt with invert normals turned on to give you a nice way of blending between your blue water and more green peaks. It'll also work as a handy way to blend on some whitecaps.

Here's an early render using this - the original surface was a dreamscape mesh I think, you can also try hot4max which is a free ocean surface, but it might start to look tiled for bigger oceans. The blending on the whitecaps is a bit soft / not exactly accurate but it's an early test.

[Morne]

thanks again John for your excellent tips, will give this a go