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Hi. I need some help making realistic animated water for a river or lake/ocean (not swimming pool or clear water in a glass).
I don't really need caustics (and would like to avoid them for reduced speed of rendering).
Previously we have used MentalRay and the Ocean shader (in the displacement channel) - this gave us lots of control and ideally we are looking for a similar solution using Maxwell.

Any help would be much appreciated!

Jesper

Have you considered Realflow?

Hi James,
Yes, we've looked at it and it looks very impressive, but I really cannot justify the cost for the task at hand.
Don't get me wrong here - I fully appreciate what RealFlow can do, but for a 3d arch viz studio like us, we just want realistic water. I would settle for a gentle ripple effect (not necessarily full animated waves) but we do need an animated effect on the water so it does not apear stationary. Any tips or links to tutorials would be much appreciated.
Thanks
Jesper

Is 3D Max your main application? I don't know if the plugin supports animated textures but I guess that would be the way to go, used as a displacement map. Or an animated mesh even for faster renders if you have enough RAM.

Hi Mihai,
Thanks for your reply. Yes we're working in 3ds Max 2012 with Maxwell as our renderer (obviously). I think we will be using a water material with a bump/displacement effect and possibly a bitmap or similar to give a good water look. We will probably add a very subtle wave effect (using the "wave" modifier on the water surface mesh). Now, I am a little confused here; we would like to get a good animated water texture as you said, but as far as I know maxwell does not support this !? (I am confused because you work for NextLimit, right? and you say in your post that you are unsure if Maxwell supports animated textures ?? can you please find out and confirm of this is correct).

We came across this issue before, when we wanted to show a movie on a screen on a shop window in one of our animations, and we had to do it in adobe after effects as maxwell didn't support any animated file types eg .mov, .avi etc.).
If I am wrong about this please let me know, otherwise we would very much like to see this feature added to Maxwell in the next release.

Thanks,

Jesper

Yes, currently Maxwell can't use any quicktime or avi files directly as a texture, I ment from the 3DMax plugin because maybe it does something similar to the C4D plugin where you assign a quicktime movie to a cinema shader and the Maxwell plugin can extract the right frame from it as a tga, which will be used as the texture.

Please ask the developers in the Max section because I'm not sure at all. I don't use Max or C4D

You can't use movies as textures in Max, but you can extract the frames as individual files and use the sequence option in the texture node.

Yes, animated textures are supported through the Max plugin, but only as an image sequence (as mentioned). Keep in mind that your render time could increase pretty dramatically if you use displacement for your waves. The best option is animating a mesh.

Brian / Mihai / Mihnea,

thanks all for your tips. The ability to use a sequence was news to me so that's obviously a great help. Thanks. Finally, can anyone recommend a good source for animated water textures?

Also, Brian, by "animating a mesh", do you mean a simple "wave" modifier applied to a high polygon water plane object?

Jesper

Jesper Pedersen wrote:Also, Brian, by "animating a mesh", do you mean a simple "wave" modifier applied to a high polygon water plane object?

This could work, but might not be very realistic looking.Maybe you could experiment with multiple wave modifiers. Really, the best/easiest way would be to use a RealWave from Realflow, but...

Hi Brian,
Yes, I think you're right, the wave modifier is just too basic to give a realistic effect. I'm sure you are right about RealFlow being both the best and easiest solution, but unfortunately it's outside of our budget (and we are a fulltime arch viz company). A simpler version limited to creating lakes, rivers & simple ocean (oh yeah and maybe fountains too) would be very attractive to us (at a cost of say €100 )
Thanks again for your help!

Jesper

What about Glu3D? http://3daliens.com/joomla/V

Chris

Chris I get a 404 Not found...

h/