I’m working on an open ocean scene with a displaced plane for the water surface. The displacement map is a procedural smoke map that’s a modification of the one used in the flavrsaver’s oil rig scene. The problem that I’m having is that when I get the camera down to only a few feet above the surface, the waves are composed of stepping heights -- like an architect’s physical model of site contours.
I’ve just about torn my hair out trying to resolve this issue, but so far I’ve only been able to reduce the size of the stepping by scaling down the UVW map size. Has anyone experienced this type of issue before? Is it unique to the smoke procedural map?
Thanks Vlado. Our workstations and farm are all set up for 64-bit only, so it will take a considerable amount of labor to setup for 32-bit as well. Not sure I have the time to do that for this job, might just go with a Photoshop fix, but I’ll give that a shot as soon as I’m able.
Hi Shaun,
maybe the quick solution is to render a bitmap out of your procedural and take care of tiling instead of retouching wrong places…
It depends on what’s faster for you…
I’m pretty sure that Vlado meant 3ds max when he suggested to try the 32-bit version, as he asked what version of max I was using in his first post. There is no texture file that I’m using, the displacement is generated by a procedural smoke map.
Jozef --
I did try this awhile back, but for my scene there’s no real way to make a bitmap texture work. The amount of area that I need to cover means the texture would have to be fairly sizable, but also hold up to close inspection. The map had to be ridiculously large in order to get the crisp wave crests that the procedural map generates. I’ve attached an image of my latest ocean render so you can see. I’ve minimized the glitch so it doesn’t show up unless you’re right on top of the water, which should be sufficient until a fix is found.
Thanks guys, this has been a fun brain teaser. We only started doing naval work last year, so we’ve been working to refine our environments with every project we do. I’ll make sure to post the finished renderings after we deliver next week!
I ended up scaling down the UVW map size considerably and increasing the size in the smoke parameters. I don’t really understand why this doesn’t cause tiling in the smoke map, as every other procedural map has a definitive edge when using explicit map channel coordinates, but regardless it’s working great!
Very cool! Definitely something worth exploring. I wonder how Max would handle it when expanded to cover more than a thousand square foot area -- even moreso if the camera sees the horizon. Certainly worth experimenting with, thanks for pointing that out!
I have done a lot of water shots in one of the latest animation projects.
I tried almost eveything and ended up with dreamscape water object and vray material with animated bump and no displacement.
The displacement used up to much memory that i needed for other things.
The dreamscape Object is dynamic and is drawn only where your camera is looking and uses less detail towards the horizon until its only an infinite plane.
It works even for fast camera flying above the water and its already animated with tweakable wind settings.
The geometry works like a perfect tileable bitmap so you can instance it and each tile will match the next one perfectly. The only thing is that it will probably look repetitive over a long distance.
Another great thing is that the animation is a perfect loop so you can do a animated proxy of say 100 frames and it will keep looping perfectly forever…
Great stuff, guys, thanks for the pointers. I hear ya about the RAM usage for displacement. So far it hasn’t been a problem in our still renderings, but animations present a whole new challenge. We’re examining our options for recreating ocean water in animation, but the biggest sticking point remains having the water interact dynamically with the boat model. Realflow keeps coming up -- any other recommendations?
