[Fernando Tella]

with smoothing on, the peaks of the waves, which in real life when being wind driven they have quite 'sharp' ridges, get rounded off and this makes it look like suddenly there is no wind and the sea is starting to calm down, and the sea start to get a glassy or 'oily' look. Perfectly real, but not the 'look' Jesper is after I believe.

In order to have sharp peaks, you should prefer a higher resolution map having quick changes in contrast with higher displacement precision. Turning smoothing off surely won't be a shortcut to do that.

Maybe just adding some noise to your map would make the effect you want (with smoothing on)? Haven't tried.

Is that Jespers texture you are using for the displacement? It looks really good. Did you just make it tileable, because I cant see the repeat at that angle, or is that a different texture map?

Yep. In the first one it also had a bump texture which was included in the material I used to make the test. I removed it to make the following tests. The displacement texture is Jesper's; you can see one line at bottom left corner, a dark one in line with the end of the cylinder,...

[Fernando Tella]

Yep, material has Nd=1,33 and bottom is monochrome.

Haven't tested with coloured bottom, but you could also map transmittance colour.

What Max says is a good solution too. You won't have displacement rendering slowdown. (But this should render nice anyway).

[Bubbaloo]

It seems to me the trouble is in your displacement map. You want sharp peaks, but your displacement map doesn't allow it (as Tom mentioned). So you are trying to create these peaks by turning off smoothing which in turn makes the rest of the waves facetted, not just the peaks. Make a better displacement map that works with smoothing on.

[Maximus3D]

I ran a quick test with that oceanwaves plugin i mentioned on the previous page. This is what it can look like rendered.. and this is a pretty dense mesh which even animates very nicely!



/ Max

[zak]

Maximus3D: Maximus3D: Could you upload your material? Its look very convincing !

[Maximus3D]

Sure thing Zak here you go.. but it's very simple. Btw i placed a plane a bit below the oceansurface and then lit the scene with physical sky. That's all!

http://rapidshare.com/files/150256012/M ... l.mxm.html

/ Max

[JesperW]

This is what it can look like rendered.. and this is a pretty dense mesh which even animates very nicely!

Super nice. But good luck running that surface all the way to the horizon

The horizon needs to be about 1000 - 2000 meters away to look convincing, depending on the camera height.

It would be great if the mesh resolution was adaptive, like it is in http://www.afterworks.com/DreamScape.asp (But that surface only extends in front of the camera, not behind it, making reflections look completely ugly).

[m-Que]

Last solution i can think of is that you generate a ocean mesh instead of using displacement for this. There are X amounts of ways to do that but here's a nice free plugin for 3dsmax which creates realistic looking oceanwaves.

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

/ Max

I see you're already getting into 3dsmax, Maximus. That's nice!
Go Max, Go!!!