Playing with Water

Unfortunately a large portion of my grad film will include water, more specifically the ocean. At this point in time i don't even know how to approach this. This pretty much covers one of hardest possible areas of 3D. Simulation of fluids is hard in every definition of the term. However, there are a few ways to create water.

1. To actually simulate water with millions and millions of particles (very time consuming) in a program such as realflow, and then shade and render it in Maya. Great thing about doing it this way Is it allows for realistic interaction between the fluid and other objects in the scene. However I haven't got a clue on how to approach this.

2. Use the Maya ocean shader, which despite its complexity is actually quite fast to render. It is feasible to use for animation however there are quite a lot of few issues i have to contend with in order to make this work.


test1: this is pretty much stock settings but i did adjust the shader a bit, but as of right now neither the animation nor the shading is very convincing.



test2: the animation is a bit better but the shading of it is going to be a huge problem from what i can tell.

The problem with water is that, for it to look convincing it needs to take in the reflection and refractions of all the surrounding objects and environments, not to mention interact with objects in the water. This shader, from what i know can't really do that, but it's too early to say since it is still new to me.

Another problem is that this shader doesn't work in V-ray, which isn't too big of an issue.

3. To use a combination of displacement maps and bump maps in order to achieve water. This will work on any rendering engine, but again interaction with this method is impossible.
An important thing to remember when working with this method is that you must use either the mia material or vray material, which are both physically accurate, and one of the reason for this is because it allows for fresnel reflection. This is to simulate a reflective quality found in dielectric materials such as water or glass where the the reflectivity of a surface will change depending on the angle being viewed. I feel that this might be the easiest way to make an ocean, but as of right now I just don't know enough about all of this to make any conclusions about what i should use.


To create the ocean i want will undoubtedly be a very big challenge. I need to look into techniques regarding this. At worst I think I should limit the water I use in my grad film.