vray 3 oceantex hdr env

[kimgar]

hahah, "disgusting renders", been there done that. it is beautiful though, when the post work manages to save those shots anyway. i'm really pressed for time as usual, and have no talented nuke guy but myself (- talent), so there will be disgusting in, disgusting out. luckily the client focuses more on the technical aspects of the animation, so i hope it will be ok.

[joconnell]

What can help at the expense of a slight amount of render time is a few additional elements.

I tended to render the water with a fresnel map for reflections and play with the curve to have the most change between the flat and peaked parts of the water and the same in the diffuse too going between a deep blue and a greeny blue. You can also render an extra tex with a vray dirt map for your water, invert the normals on it and play with your radius and you'll get an element that gives you a soft ramp leading up to the sharp crests of the water - you can use this for further CC stuff so you can bring in some fake translucency in the tips of the water or if you colour correct it very harshly, make yourself some pseudo whitecaps. Definitely render out a samplerinfo pass set to UV coordinates too, then in nuke you can use a node called ST map which will take a bitmap or a bit of footage and conform it using the uv render on to the surface of your water with the bitmap or footage sticking to the surface of the water - you can use this to put on foam passes or other noise patterns for variety. Likewise a normal ambient occlusion map for your water so you get a contact shadow for your boat combined with some noise mapped using st map can give you some whitewater around the base of the boat.

[kimgar]

wooho! this is golden! thanks a bunch, i really love nuke, but am no compositor so i never get around to learn these sneaky little things. fake translucency and pseudo whitecaps, that last post is a goldmine john. wish the nuke community and forums were as open and helpful as vray's. alright, i'm definately gonna dig into this, but first, weekend has arrived, my preview has just been shipped and everybody is off for beers, have a great weekend everyone!

[joconnell]

Ooh - just for the laugh, get yourself some tileable noise maps or whitewater maps, there's some on cgtextures, and render them as extra tex elements with the water - a few different scales of the same thing is going to be very useful. You can use the AO element for your whitecap mask, blend it with one of the whitewater bitmap for some detail and have a nice organic looking element.

[vance3d]

Thats a good tip! I'll use that next time I do an ocean for sure.

V Miller