Hi, (EDITED)
I share your frustration.
The sample materials supplied and the naming of the sample materials is somewhat misleading. For example ‘Waves_A_01_200cm’, what does the 200 stands for, 200cm wave height? 200cm tile size? In any case, the units of your scene are critical for the material to display correctly.
I agree that some good tutorials for all methods are very much needed in the documentation specially when it comes to the relationship with the scene units. I’ve learned it over the years with trial and error an pulling my hair in many occasions. Not the preferred method specially for beginners.
BTW remember that if you are using an infinite plane you can only use bump mapping and not displacement.
Procedural noise method:
Unfortunately the procedural noise samples (Waves Proc 01 and 02) won’t work with mm because it uses ‘Noise A’ and the parameters don’t have a sufficiently large range, for example you need a much larger Amplitude and it only goes to 20 (you need 800-1000). I raised this issue a long time ago when Vray 3 was still in beta and it has not been resolved yet so it makes it impossible to create ocean water in mm or even inches with these procedural sample materials.
However you can get some results changing the noise to ‘Noise B’:
- Start with 'Waves Proc 01 or 02"
- Change amount to 300 (you can adjust it later)
- Click on the map swatch
- Change the noise in the bump to ‘Noise B’ (choose it from the 3D textures library)
- Change type to ‘Regular’ or ‘Turbulence’
- Size 80
- Turn on ‘Use 3d Mapping’ further down.
That should give you a start from where you can adjust the parameters to your taste.
For bitmap generated waves try this
- Start with 'Waves_A_01_200cm" sample material. This material uses a noise texture bitmap to create the wave pattern.
- Go to the bump parameter of the material and increase the amount to say 150 or more depending on how strong you want the waves.
- Leave the surface mapping in rhino to the default.
- Click on the texture slot to open the bitmap parameters.
- Under ‘Texture Placement’ play with the ‘Repeat UV’ value to make the wave pattern bigger or smaller. Start with say 0.1 in both directions U/V (you can lock the aspect ratio with the chainlink symbol).
This should give you a decent ocean water look for a large ship scene.
You can replace the seamless bitmap used for the bump mapping with other images. Below I’ve attached a few that I use.
Using the ‘Water’ procedural texture:
Start as above with a black diffuse and 95% reflection
- Bump amount 300
- Choose ‘Water’ in the 2D texture library
- Click on the texture swatch
- Leave height multiplier to 1. You can scale everything later with this patameter.
- Resolution 1024
- Patch size 5000
- Seed: any value
- Wind magnitude 200. The larger the bigger the waves.
- Under ‘Texture placement’ change both Repeat U/V to 0.1
Hover the mouse on the parameter names to see what they do.
Some good tutorials for all methods are very much needed in the documentation specially when it comes to the relationship with the scene units. I’ve learned over the years with trial and error an pulling my hair. Not the preferred method specially for beginners.
Using Displacement:
The methods above can be applied to the displacement texture swatch as well.
One disadvantage of using bump maps over displacement is that when you are close to the objects (a ship for example), the water will look flat because as you probably know, no geometry is modified. While bump maps render fast and use little memory, to create convincing ocean water around a boat you need to use displacement specially when creating ship wake and bow generated waves.
To create wake and Kelvin patterns around the moving vessel you can combine several maps in one material and apply them to a large mesh with various mapping channels combining transparency, bump and displacement.
You can find many examples here
