Im doing some ocean renders and it made me wondering if its possible to make a vray node taking use of houdinis spectra and masking for oceans like in “ocean sample layers” vop node.
We can ofcourse bake out a displacement but then we need a whole frame range with very high resolution textures or bake it to geometry which becomes quick super heavy.
Checking for quriosity 
Regards Alexis
It’s could be very nice and usefull.
Devs already working on to this, but it’s not ready yet.
Excellent! Looking forward to this.
Is there any progress on this?
Not much, I’m afraid. We added a texture that can be used to sample volumes and return color information. We now need to add another one that can convert the phase/amplitude etc volumes from the spectrum into something suitable for displacement, and we also need to figure out a solution for the masks. Then we can package this all up into something similar to the Ocean Sample Layers VOP.
Rendering those spectrums directly would be an incredibly useful feature so I’m also here hoping we can get it working as soon as possible.
Best regards!
Thanks for the update Gosho. I think this will be a very valuable feature. It seems like a large number of jobs involve water surfaces of some sort.
Just thought this could be interesting to share. Like the idea of running vex directly in the render.
https://www.marcelruegenberg.com/blog/2020/9/9/houdini-arnold-ocean-spectra
Man, vex shaders in vray would be amazing.
Indeed, we were considering this. It would mean having to set up HEngine licenses on the farm and render through Houdini instead of V-Ray Standalone, however - I’m wondering if that sounds reasonable?
Best regards!
hm, true. Would cost alot with that many licenses for us. Would we be able to switch?
Regards Alexis
Yeah, I suppose if you’re not using anything VEX-related, it won’t be an issue to send the scenes straight to standalone.
However, we will probably look into this after adding Oceans support as discussed above.
Best regards!
We need oceans very often, so a robust solution is important for us. Last time we baked it - single bakes above 8K are indeed slow, so the wedge ROP helps to split up the geometry into regions and bake these in parallel on the farm. It’s not as fast and high res as sampling the spectra, but it’s workable.
There are problems with motion blur with animated displacement though, which I have reported.
Being able to read spectrum volumes in vray to generate the displacement would really really useful.
This is one of the constant fights everytime you don’t render in mantra.
Yep another bump from me here too. This would be a very welcome feature.
Here too would be very nice to have!
One more vote from me, this would be a killer feature!
Hey @docaml ,
That’s not the ocean spectrum data you are picking for the displacement, you are pluging in the baked maps directly into the displacement. That is the standard workflow to make ocean spectrums renderable outside of mantra. You are just saving yourself the step of saving those maps out and reading them back in, but when you create your vrscene all those maps will be baked into the vrscene.
What we are looking for is native support of the ocean spectrum, like @LeoYfver said in his original post:
… if its possible to make a vray node taking use of houdinis spectra and masking for oceans like in “ocean sample layers” vop node.
We would like to use the spectrum and ocean sample layers directly.
We can of course bake out a displacement but then we need a whole frame range with very high resolution textures or bake it to geometry which becomes quick super heavy.
And this is the issue with the texture baking, it’s super heavy, and you don’t bake them out to textures then they’ll end up in the vrscenes making them gigantic too.
Best,
David.
@david.anastacio Aha, I see. Didn’t read carefully all the posts. 
