Stormy ocean on Youtube (Page 2)

[Henry Blewer]

This new version is much better. Fantastic work here!

[Hannes]

Another one. Still some frames to render.

[inkydigit]

spectacularly realistic work Hannes....brilliant!

[Hannes]

Here is the link to the animation (a little less than 800 frames). I know the weather should be really bad and dark, but I wanted these lighting conditions to show the reflections for testing purposes.
I thought it would appear in higher resolution, since it's rendered in 1024X436, but maybe I made a mistake. It took quite some time to upload, so I hope you can still see some details:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ipxSilfPEqo

I'm not entirely happy with it, because there is still foam sliding over the waves which makes it look rather unnatural. It's OK in the distance but in the foreground it looks fake. I spent a long time creating this animation and made also some tests with warping PFs with other PFs, but it looked even worse.

There have to be some choppy waves that distort and drag the foam pattern to make it look real. Here are two examples of what I have in mind:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3YW9WFwD-rI&feature=related
http://www.vimeo.com/12933990

The first example is some real time game engine thing. It's a bit exaggerated but not bad.
The second example is made with 3ds Max and a plugin called Dreamscape. The creator used just a static foam texture which is dragged by the vertical AND horizontal displacement of the mesh. I tried that myself before and it's really working.
I wish something like this could be done in TG.

[Kadri]

Hannes, i can not comment on the video because we have Youtube (it is still forbidden) problems here and what i see from ztunnel.com is very blurry.
But what you are trying to do is mostly a hard thing to do in other packages too. Mostly it is done with other plugins and so.
I would like to try this but i use the free version unfortunately!
But i think it can be done to an extend (or maybe very good) in TG2 . If it can be done it will be because of users like you 

I wrote this mostly because sometimes there aren't much responses to the topics as it should be !

Here on the forum are some node wizards who could do something to make this better as it is !

Cheers!

[Henry Blewer]

I like you animation better than both of the examples you posted. There is an example in the book Mastering Blender that uses a null object to drive the displacement of the waves. Multiple height fields may be able to do much the same. The detail in your example is great. I would not change much, since your version is already awesome.

[domdib]

It looks pretty impressive to me Hannes. I especially like the low cloud scudding across the water.

[Tangled-Universe]

Very nice animation Hannes! The low mist/clouds work well with the scene.
I only have one slight small crit and that's the ridged shape on the left which seems a bit persistent in the last couple of seconds.
Other than that very cool work.

There is an example in the book Mastering Blender that uses a null object to drive the displacement of the waves.

Henry, what does this actually mean or how does this work? I think I don't understand.

[Seth]

I second Martin on this one.
the mist is very good in this scene, and the ocean overall is really really cool !!! except the ridged shape  in the last seconds,
as stated by Martin.

anyway, best ocean so far, me think ^^

[Henry Blewer]

In Blender the water/wave object is a mesh. The null object is connected to the mesh is a way that it drives a displacement of the mesh. The null object acted like a magnet which repelled an area of the mesh; that's the best explanation. What I was thinking was to use several mesh objects, linked; then morph through them in Terragen 2. But I don't have the animation version of T2. I think it could work like this though. Vista Pro 3 could do it.

I wish I still had the book. I loaned it to a resident where I work. It went out the door with the resident when he moved out.

[Tangled-Universe]

In Blender the water/wave object is a mesh. The null object is connected to the mesh is a way that it drives a displacement of the mesh. The null object acted like a magnet which repelled an area of the mesh; that's the best explanation. What I was thinking was to use several mesh objects, linked; then morph through them in Terragen 2. But I don't have the animation version of T2. I think it could work like this though. Vista Pro 3 could do it.

I wish I still had the book. I loaned it to a resident where I work. It went out the door with the resident when he moved out.

I have the animation version Wanna give it a try?

[Hetzen]

Some good work there Hannes. I don't think there's anything wrong with your foam evolution, maybe a little slower.

A helpful suggestion, is maybe giving your waves (and foam) a lateral direction in movement too, and let the PFs that make them, evolve slightly more slowly.

[Volker Harun]

Very hard work which looks really convincing ... if called 'boiling water' - which was the first impression my son had ,-)

Seriously, I once or twice asked for null shaders like in blender. Thinking of an animated object with procedural textures - moving simultanously by moving the null-shader.
My first thought to minimize this effect was to 'stretch' the foam's PF  by 0.1 along the Y-axis - this might cause some weird distortions on the slopes, though.

The only chance I see for now is to create your own fractals with functions. Here you can use one 'get position in texture' node which is translated by one 'add vector'.
This result can be used for different noises which can be easily translated in a less ordered way (for the foam for example you multiply the above result with a vector of 1.01, 1.00, 1.00, to have a slight faster movement along the x axis)

Volker

[Henry Blewer]

I'll see what I can come up with in Blender. But it will be Thursday or Friday before the image I am rendering is done.

[Hannes]

Thank you all!!
Volker, these suggestions might be very useful. if only I could understand this function stuff  Maybe you could post an example for a nerd like me?
Anyway, to create a convincing ocean, there have to be some PFs or whatever that deform the mesh or the terrain not only horizontally but also vertically in a way that certain vertices are pushed together and pulled apart during the motion. I don't know how to explain this, so here are two examples. Maybe someone has an idea to achieve this. If we could then warp or distort an image shader or even a PF with this function, it may look like the second example I posted (the dreamscape video).