Procedural Ocean Texture - fine at angle, but suck from top view

[Morne]

Hi all

I have an ocean texture that looks pretty good at an angle, but looks more and more like a signel flat colour the more "direct from top" you go.
Its applied to a VRayPlane (so no UV)

I'm using LWF.

texture like so:
diffuse = 1,1,3
reflect = falloff - 1st slot 1,1,3 and 2nd slot 149,149,150
reflect glosiness 0.9

refract = off (0,0,0) dont need refraction (especially since I dont have a bottom)

bump = noise 1st slot 0,0,0, 2nd slot 100,100,100 and size of noise 2500
(my units are in mm)

so like I said, from an angle it looks good and I can see the "waves" and it reflects my buildings pretty nice, but from a higherr angle I dont see any waves (from noise) and just get a flat diffuse colour.
I'm looking at a site that is about half a kilometer wide.

Any tips?

[Da_elf]

my guess is its the lack of refraction and bottom thats giving unsatisfactory results

[Morne]

but then on deep ocean shots I'm pretty sure its also just a plane of sorts, with no bottom

[Da_elf]

larger waves would give more variance with the reflection however, looking at high shots of oceans look flat blue for deep ocean. Closer in the reefs and ocean floor give variance

[joconnell]

Bingo - it's just the reflections looking boring. Since your reflections are likely fresnel, They'll be stronger on parts of the ocean that faces to the side. This means you can either make the peaks on your waves higher so that the polygons on the peaks face to the side more, or you can use a falloff map in your reflection slot and play with the output curve to get a much stronger change in reflection level over the surface of your wave. One thing that helps for this I find is using a reflection filter element which will give you a black and white mask that shows the strength of the reflections on each object - you can use this as a reference to get the best transition between reflection and non reflection areas to give you the most pronounced effect. Also Something with very low, side lighting as a reflection map will help this.