[oz42]

I found this great little tutorial for Arnold, in which the ocean looks superb;
https://support.solidangle.com/display/ ... splacement

NB: This is their image, not mine!


And I thought I'm sure Maxwell could do just as well! They include a free Vector Displacement map which I used in Maxwell and whilst it worked, the displaced surface was very 'pixelated' (or 'voxelated as it's 3D!).

NB: Go to Arnold tutorial link above for full sized *.exr texture


I turned the displacement subdivisions up to 16 and it got a bit better but still very 'angular'. I did try 32 but the computer froze (or should I say melted!) NB: I used a vector scale of 0.1 for X,Y & Z (a scale of 1 is way too big!)

Does anyone have any experience with vector displacement in Maxwell?

P.S. this isn't for an immediate project (although it may come in handy), I just wanted to show that Maxwell could do it too!

[Mihai]

You probably need to tile it a lot, the map is only 1024x1024. Otherwise you see the displacement caused by individual pixels.

[Mihai]

Here I've just used a plane with 100x100 subdivisions (in its ppg, not maxwells displacement), and tiling set to 1.5
I set Vector displacement option to absolute, so take care that in this case the displacement will appear bigger or smaller depending on how big the plane is (or what you use as Global Scale Factor in Render Options). The scale of vector displacement is 0.01 in this case. I didn't use more than 8 for the subdivision setting because the plane was already subdivided enough. It didn't make any more difference with more than 8. Remember with vector displacement, it doubles the amount of polys with each increase in subdivision setting so you can quickly run out of RAM, especially if the object has an initial high nr of polys.

[oz42]

This is what I was after! Thanks.

I'll have another go and see what I can get...

[tom]

or...

[oz42]

lovely! What settings did you use?

[tom]

I throw an 8 x 8 plane with 64 subdivision for displacement using 3D Realflow as vector displacement preset at 0.001 scale. But the realism comes from your HDR because my water material is nothing else than a mirror with Nd 1.3.

[oz42]

Genius! Thanks.

[Mihai]

my water material is nothing else than a mirror with Nd 1.3.

Yup, same here