From time to time I need to do some ocean water stuff. I dug out one of my older files and tried to improve it, while simplifying it at the same time.
This one is pure procedural. There are two water shaders, but without reflection or transparency. Just for the displacement. Power fractals give more control, but nothing beats the water shader's displacement.
Apart from my ocean foam pattern I was sharing in one of Ulco's threads:
https://planetside.co.uk/forums/index.php/topic,30223.msg295081.html#msg295081(which is procedural as well), I used mainly the intersect underlying feature with different compute terrain nodes (with different patch sizes) to control the foam generation and the distribution of brighter blue and green parts of the water. The latter fake translucency by using a bit luminosity.
As you can see in my setup, it's fairly simple (and quite tidy!! I'm getting better...
). This scene has no GI and no shadows just for speeding up the rendertime (6-7 minutes per frame). Using this setup would require both of course if it would be part of a scene with objects for example.
The good thing with this setup is, that I only need to increase the size of the plane to make it fill the field of view. The surface stays like it is.
Unfortunately the 5MB restriction forced me to compress the clip quite a lot. Maybe the Planetside staff should increase the maximum size. There aren't too many people here posting animations, so, I don't think this would be a problem here.
