when rendering the sea, I get some lines on my waves which have a rectilinear / square character.
Any idea how to solve this? Is it the bump map? It’s quite a big one (2048 pix sq).
Does Vray maybe have some sort of smoothing function?
Seems like it’s to do with the displacement. I used a second map for bump, but when I render the sea with that one only, there are only very very faint bumps. So that one’s not the problem.
Do I need to subdivide the base surface to provide more resolution for the displacement? Where do I do that? Rhino? Vray?
Maybe it’s caused by limited grey values. Is your map 8bit/16bit/32bit? Maybe it helps to convert it to 32bit and blur it a little bit.
Hello Micha,
thanks for your reply.
I tried as you suggested, but no difference. I assume the problem lies in the subdivisions of the base surface the displacement is acting on?
I’ve had this same issue many years back with Maxwell as well, and in the end I just modeled tileable blocks of a wavy sea to substitute the displacement. Doesn’t seem the thing to do anymore in 2019…
How come there are so many examples of high-end displacement online with other softwares, while in Rhino, I seem to always get less than ideal results?
Is it because rhino lacks the flexibility to add subdivisions to the surfaces because it’s NURBS- based? Or does Vray have this functionality? (I can’t find any tutorial on this really)
Very frustrating, all this!
You need to keep in mind that the underlaying display/render mesh is subdived by V-Ray. So, if at your mesh settings “simple plane” is enabled than it could be not enough initial polygons. Often I used a defined polygon count per “minimal initial grid quads” like 100000.
Could you please share with us a sample project where the issue is reproducible to further investigate? If this is alright, please send us an archived copy (V-Ray > Pack Project) to support@chaosgroup.com via email or a file-sharing service of your choice.
even though GPU rendering would give a less than ideal outcome, as shown above, it would result in another issue that I had before, again to do with CPU / GPU rendering.
In this case it was the GPU rendering that caused the problem (blurred backplate image). So whichever render engine I use, there’s always a problem.
I’ve sent the file to be tested by you guys at support.
I managed to get rid of the little bumps and the edge line of the texture that was used for the bump map.
Basically took the original texture (without issues) and saved it to .tif in PS before scaling it to a 3x3 repeat matrix and overlaying it over the original. (this to make a combined map for the 3rd and 4th level waves). Then saved it in .tif. No loss of quality, no edges.
So, issue that remains is the CPU render messing with the displacement (block/strata effect), the GPU messing with the backplate (motion blur effect) and the GPU still leaving a facetted effect on the water surface.
You background looks much better now. Are you using GPU rendering? Did you change the GPU texture mode?
Without the displacement the water doesn’t looks so real like before.
yes, the issue with the background is solved. As mentioned, the problem was with the resizing of the texture in GPU rendering. I set it to “on demand mipmapping” under render parameters / GPU textures.
Now I still need to get the sea to look convincing…
FYI, the ball in the image above is 1meter diameter. Just so you can have a sense of scale…
Is going up in texture size to 4096 x 4096 pixels, (and then blurring) a possibility? At which point do texture sizes become outrageous? (especially if used for displacement)
I’m not sure about the size, it’s a question of your GPU memory and the memory usage of your model. I think most important to avoid height steps and 8bit are 255 steps only. And reflections easy show small errors. If you like you could post the original map here and I take a look on it. I could try to upsize it per AI Gigapixel.
I converted the image to 16bit png, 6x upscaled it (denoised, deblured too) and fixed some problems at the seams. I hope the denoise process removed the 8bit steps. I’m curious how it will look now.
That’s a pity, that the fine details can’t be kept. I hope @Peter.Chaushev has an idea. A procedural shader could be great.
I’ve just started a new topic on the matter of adding smaller wavelets. I also run into a problem there.
The topic is at:
It could work for the 1 Beaufort waves, for sure. Can you post it here?
The one I’m trying to achieve right now is 2-3 Beaufort and for that you’d need waves that are becoming more pyramid-shaped.
The one I’m using (the one you scaled) is maybe even too peaky, meaning the crests are so pointy and they seem like creases in some areas. I hope that by adding smaller wavelets this will become less obvious. But at the lack of a better texture, this one will do.
It still is a strange thing, that even though the earth is covered by sea for 2/3rds there’s no simple pack of bump maps out there in 2019 that make a good job of rendering real waves.
Oh, I don’t saved the material, but you see the whole parameters of the procedural shader at my screenshot.
Right, no good water textures on a planet full of water. 
Also there is no procedural material at the material library which based on the special water shader, only perlin noise materials.
Ah, ok, I never used procedural, didn’t realize it were only numbers…
Exactly, all there seems to be is some blurred noise maps, like they started out rendering water 15 years ago… seems like time stood still in the mean time.
Given that there are programs like Phoenix and Realflow, wouldn’t it be possible to extract a tiled bump texture out of there?
When rendering the water based on the procedural texture in GPU mode, the waves structure disappears after initial sampling. In CPU mode they show rightly. Is that normal, procedural not working in GPU render mode?