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How to make an ocean with rolling waves?


RyanSpaulding
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Hey guys,

 

Does anyone have a link for a tut on how to do this in 3dsMax or VIZ?

 

We've been using Vue for awhile now and the time and overhead just isn't cutting it anymore...I have a big project ($1.8 billion port in Madagascar) that they want to revise....money is no issue...and I think 3DSMax would be best for this.

 

Any ideas?

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A while ago there was a post at the v-ray forums where people were playing with this plugin:

 

http://charles.hollemeersch.net/Projects/24/oceanwaves

 

I have not used it and I believe it is for an older version of max. The results looked pretty good. Here is the original v-ray posting (you need to have an account)

 

http://www.chaosgroup.com/forum/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=17959&highlight=waves

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Well, I was just browsing along today and came across this and it surely knocked my socks off as to what it can do.

 

They are 3rd party plug ins to 3ds max. Just click the gallery and click on the animations part. Then check out the ocean movies they submitted and get your checkbook out!

 

http://www.afterworks.com/index.asp

 

Ah, Dreamscape. Looks entirely possible.

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Do you mind elaborating on the time and overhead comment? What issues were you running in to working with Vue?

 

Rendering time...getting a non-flickering GI animation out of Vue costs time (11 mins per frame at 576x324) and money (farm)...also, the overall look for the time taken doesn't match what Max could do...memory management is poor...th workflow is poor for changes...anythng designed in feet ends up about10x bigger than it should be...use meters and its way smaller.

 

I'm just tired of Vue. It'll be good for certain projects I guess but overall, not arch work.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Looks like I'd run into a major issue in Dreamscape with farming it out. As far as I can tell, there isn't a single farm that supports this plugin...meaning you'd run into an issue when farming. I'll need 3 minutes of video...too much to do in-house.

 

Did some digging and found you cant export animated meshes either...

 

I wonder if RealFlow can....

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There is a book entitled Deconstructing the Elements in Max" and a updated version was just recently released too I believe but they had a very good tutorial on ocean waves if I remember correctly

 

i have this book, it is excellent, Pete draper has a web site with some tuts too.

 

WWW.Xenormorphic.co.uk

 

there is a stormy sea tutorial there, might be what your after.

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Wow Ryan, do you really have a problem with that rendertime? I'd say 11 minutes per frame is great. 1.5 or 2 hours per frame and then I'd start to get a little worried.

 

Well, it's all relative. If Vue handled resources better, it wouldn't be such a bear to work with...and the quality isn't there. It's a non-GI animation. When I turned it to GI, with a quality boost of 2 (Vue needs this for non-flickering), it jumped to 1 1/2 hours per 576x324 frame...and doesn't look THAT much better.

 

I could never get my client to pay up for that kind of time with the type of output I'm getting.

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This is a test I used with the plugin mentioned earlier free at http://charles.hollemeersch.net/Projects/24/oceanwaves

I don't think it works with max9/viz2008 yet

 

I tiled it a few times and made an animated displacement map using falloff in the top viewport (sequence of exr files for one wave cycle). Then I used the displacement map twice on a mesh plane, once with max displacement and again with vray displacement with two different uvw channels. Varying uvw mapping and wave height between the two gives more randomness (helping out with tiling) and you get big swells (max displacement) and smaller waves (vray displacement). Also used noise in the bump slot for fine ripples. For the shader, I used a blend material masked with falloff to get whitecaps. Somebody else in the vray forum used a top/bottom material to achieve whitecaps. I also added foam using simbiont "vein" procedural map.

 

youtube is pretty blurry so here's a still

ocean.jpg

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Actually.. Ryan.. just message me your requirements.. tell me what exactly you need. Let me see if I can work out anything for you.. no, I am not looking for business, don't worry abt that.. Just tell me what you need.

You can mail me at ktejaswi@yahoo.co.uk

 

 

 

EDIT: Realwave is a good bet though.. even though it is very complex and still very buggy and resource intensive..

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  • 8 months later...

True, dreamscape and vray GI don't really work out together. But here is a workaround.

When you use Dreamscape in your scenes, turn off Atmospherics in your render options while doing one pass for the scene without sky. Then turn on atmosphere and render one more pass without the other scene objects (ie other objects hidden) . The two passes can be composited together to get the desired output without letting GI run amok in your scene. Try that...

 

PS: I am attaching a small render done with dreamscape and VRay working in tandem as mentioned above.

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