w i l l wrote:Nice. How do you create ocean/waves like that?
Lot's of work, actually. I wanted to create an environment that looked good from all angles, which means that the surface mesh has to be detailed enough for closeups around the hull, but also reach all the way to an optically correct horizon, which is about 3 Nm (5 km) away when your eye is at 2 m above the surface.
I've seen DreamScape Sea, which generates a nice adaptive grid, but only in front of the camera. Which means all reflections of the sea behind the camera are screwed.
So I wrote a program to generate the surface mesh. The mesh is rectangular near the hull, and then shifts to being radial. It is expanded in such a way that one grid quad occupies the same volumetric angle all the way to the horizon.
Here is the grid at a few different zoom levels:
This grid is then bent according to the earth radii, to create a proper falloff. Then the grid is displaced using a wave map for the larger waves.
This part of the displacement map and what the grid looks like after this:
The material for the surface has a BSDF layer with standard water properties and a rather long attenuation distance, to allow the bottom to be seen and refracted. The bottom is a flat circular surface with a color map.
The ripples on the surface are created by a normal map on the water layer. For the renders with foam on the water it gets more complex. The foam itself is two BSDF layers with the same normal map, plus there it need SSS activated otherwise the foam gets too dark in the shadows.
Here is parts of Bottom Color, Ripples NM, Foam NM and Foam Transmittance:
All maps are tiling of course.
The sea looks very dull with the Physical Sky, you need a HDRI environment to get nice reflections. I am not aware of any commercial HDRI's that go all the way to the horizon, they all seem to be photographed on land

so I synthesized the sky maps too, using Terragen:
...and while I'm posting anyway, here is to all you whiners going on about the antiskid paint. The material is now much more accurate with a normal map simulating the very rough surface with some reflective grains. I need to adjust the foam reflectivity up a bit too, I think.
...and I don't think I am going to bother with the sail much more, it's waaay to difficult, and my main job is to design the stupid yacht, not just create the renderd images...