Thanks Erik N, will have a go with the distance blend falloff map, and have a good look at Trixian’s setup.
Will post any good results.
Rob.
Have you tried using the Vray Plane object yet? Isn’t that supposed to go out to infinity? That would be a quick way of creating your horizon, ovcourse I’m not sure you’d want to displace an infinite plane 
I am afraid that won’t work at all.
Best regards,
nikki Candelero
hehe… I’ve already tried that one! Displacement doesn’t work on the vray plane 
I seem to remember an old plugin for max many many years ago that had a built-in wedge shaped primitive with poly-size increasing with distance from camera…was it seascape or something similar sounding?
Anyway…marvelous object that was then linked to the camera and deformed by spacewarps that were built in.
Anyone feel up to writing a new vray-primitive with these properties?
Preferably displaceable?
||wink||
Seascape did that, and nowadays dreamscape does that too.
Thorsten
i did two quick, dirty and basic setups to demonstrate. Everything is dreamscape. Water, material, clouds, sky. Rendered it 1.47.03. Not tweaked, or tuned hence the subsurface is off in the day shot, composition sucks etc…but one gets the point i assume 
Regards,
Thorsten
Woo, that looks gooood! :shock: Looks like I’m just going to have to spend some money and get learning dreamscape!
Thorsten, have you ever managed to render geometry (ie. a boat) in the same scene as all the dreamscape stuff?
I’m finding that the dreamscape sky does odd things when geometry is imported, like ‘fogging’ everything and screwing up the look of the sub surface.
I’m guessing a way round this is to have two separate scenes, one with dreamscape and the other with geometry, then comp the two after. Although this means you would get no benefit of the water refraction on your objects and loose any surface reflections.
…or have I missed something?..
sorry for delay…somehow missed your reply.
Yes i managed to render everything just fine in one pass. Vray DOES fog (that´s the haze parameter) that not only affects the sky, but also the whole scene. Wich is basically perfectly correct actually. What you describe (too much fog) sounds like a scaling issue. Have you tried tweaking the global scale parameter ?
Thorsten
I’ll take a look at the global scale parameter and see what happens. One thing I did notice - I’ve been using mm as my units in max - dreamscape didn’t seem to like it - changed back to metres and dreamscape seemed happy again. So scale could be the issue.
Just to confirm - setting the units to mm in max really screws things up! Metres all the way from now-on.
Still haven’t managed to master the dreamscape sea material/sub surface but have found another way which gives good/fast results :
Use dreamscape for the sky backdrop. Set the ground colour as the ‘subsurface’ colour. Illuminate the sky using a dreamscape light but make sure this doesn’t illuminate the scene - parent it to a direct light with vray shadows.
Use the dreamscape sea surface for the water geometry (this takes care of the large undulations). Add a vray matl to it - black diffuse colour, near white for reflections (use ‘fresnel’ reflections), a bit of refraction and add a mix of procedurals for the smaller surface bump - (waves-noise-turb.noise-smoke).
It seems to render faster and be more predictable than the dreamscape sea matl.
Here’s a render using those settings-
that looks great.
wow indeed
Thanks guys! 
nice job there very nice indeed.
Considering speed, yes it does render faster this way..DS´s Subsurface does a very good job tho…i really like it, also cause it is perfectly matched to the sky, so it also works timelapsed without keyframing.
Thorsten
Thanks Thorsten,
Yep, this is just a temporary solution untill I get the hang of subsurface. Needed to squeeze out a couple of renders this weekend so had to use something that I could get looking good in a short space of time. I think the dreamscape ‘sea bump’ is better than I can get with standard max procedurals but the vray fresnel reflections seem to be far better than the dreamscape reflecs. I may play with mixing the two matls at a later date. will keep you posted.
How’s chaossquid coming along?
Rob.
chaossquid is actually pretty ready for launch…there will be quite some changes along the way, but we got an initial feature-freeze (So it’s Chaossquid 1.5 RC basically ). Felix is currently away, but we will most likely go live when he returns or shortly after (should be during the next days)
Thorsten
Cool, can’t wait!
try a vray blend material with a vray material for reflection and a DS for sub surface