Ocean Shader

[shkumbin]

Hi Guys,

It has been so long since I kind of struggle with ocean shader with Vray.
My approach is usually a noise in a plane to generate the higher waves and then a vray displacement to create the smaller waves.

I do get a somewhat descent result with a simple material setting a reflective material with black diffuse and a white color in reflection with fresnel ON.
Now I really want to also see the transluscent water in some areas the greenish tint u get , I have tried with the normal translucency option but I get some weird problems.

Without the vray displacement on I get the results as expected but when I turn on the vray displacement the translucency goes away alltogether. That is really weird and I have no idea why is that happening.
Could anyway shed some light on how to achieve a more realistic ocean/water shader? Or what techniques do u usually use to get that done?

cheers

[Morne]

can you post some screenshots of your results so far?

[joconnell]

I'd be inclined to use your map that's doing the displacement with the sharp crests as a colour map also - have it using a very, very dark blue for the base going up to a green for the peaks. You don't get a huge amount of information underneath the water to see anyway so perhaps simple colour is good enough to give the suggestion of the effect rather than proper translucency?

[Neilg]

Fusion/photoshop. render falloff's in the extra tex slot & re-build the water out of the raw refraction, raw reflection, reflection/refraction filters, normals, raw light etc. Also make sure you do an environment fog pass.

I spent a couple hours tops on each of these in fusion developing the look. They're by no means perfect, but they look better than i'd have been able to do in one pass and took a tiny fraction of the time to set up. No raw renders, but rest assured they were a mess (and also had no colour whatsoever)

&


Trying to get good ocean water straight out of a raw render isnt worth the time or effort imo. If you need to adjust it in post you're going to have to re-build the entire thing anyway - may aswell just do a fast rendering (or series of) with a super basic material to get the information you need and create it all in post - both of those were done simply with a black diffuse, full refraction, full reflection & fresnel checked on.
The only thing you need to do then in cg is get the displacement and motion right, which is much easier.

The general workflow once you've got the passes rendered is to find a photo of the sea as a reference to copy from & work through 'features' matching the colouring as close as possible - you can make a mask for eg shallow angles, look at what happens on the reference at those, copy the values & move on to another feature. It's really straightforward and gives a crazy amount of control.

These are both nearly 2 years old from while I was still figuring it out - now the process is pretty much set & i've done it a few times I've been getting significantly better results.

[squintnic]

very nice
is the last one a few nested smoke maps? whats the setup with the white peaks and contact 'foam' on the ball?

[Neilg]

Smoke or noise, I cant remember exactly how it ended up. Ended up slightly messy in the node view...
The white is from a dirt in the extra tex and a copy of the displacement map in another extra tex with heavy curves in post to isolate the tops

[Da_elf]

i usually use a smoke for the major waves using putting a curve to it to sharpen the peeks and some smoke stretched for smaller waves all animated with different speeds.

[Morbid Angel]

You can look into HOT - houdini ocean tool kit its a plugin for max/maya comes with shader etc.

[jacksc02]

Yup I second the vote for HOT.
Great tool.

[squintnic]

ah iv used that but i didnt see any maps / shaders for it

[joconnell]

It's all to do with your reflection falloff (I'd be tempted to not use fresnel and instead use a falloff that you can tweak - use the reflection filter as an element) and the environment that you have for the water to reflect. Foam is hard if you want to do actual accurate foam rather than something that's mapped but the other stuff is very achievable.

[wxyz]

Phoenix for foam

[joconnell]

Can you use it to emit from a random surface though? As in if you've a big ocean, can you use your ocean plane as a source for phoenix to generate foam from or would you have to make the ocean too? I agree that this type of thing is better handled by some kind of sim unless a faked AO and bitmap approach is good enough.

[wxyz]

You could fake it with a Krakatoa or PF Collision or a Volume Select as a source.

[joconnell]

It's getting very involved now - I must admit it's one of the hardest things to do in a natural way. Dreamscape used to do a particle based approach where it'd birth particles from the crests of the waves, and then let the particles sit on the surface of the waves as they faded out. It's possible to do this with pflow and lock bond, but it's Reeeeeeeeeeeally slow to calculate for something that looks realistic.

Another nice thing is to use Grant adam's free tension modifier - it'll put out different colours for vertices depending on how relaxed or tight they are. You can use it to bake out a series of images for an animated mesh then use that as a density map to spawn particles. Not fast, but then trying to do foam is never fast :/ - http://www.rpmanager.com/plugins/TensionMod.htm