organic Ocean - Please give feedback

[Stureah]

I've been stuggeling with creating a descent looking ocean for a LONG time. Good water is kinda hard, and since i feel like i have to artistic talent and no eye for color.. lol... it get kinda difficult.

But i think this is looking pretty good. I used a lot of falloff maps to make the waves look descent with some darker areas and stuff like that..

PLEASE let me know what you guys think, and what i can do to improve the image and/or textures..

This is made with no 3rd party plugins, just 3DS max 9 and rendered with mental ray.

Enjoy..

[OzziGuy]

Looks good, but next time can you please try and make it a little bigger...I mean geez i'm squinting here bro, cant see a thing....:P

Anyway, whats with the big shadow in the foreground?? Its like theres a massive boat right behind the camera or something.

[Stureah]

Here is a new version of the ocean.. I got a good HDRI or whatever that's called as a background, and i also tamed down the waves a little bit.

The "shadow" you see is the opacity map(falloff), with a dark bottom of the background.. it came out looking like crap so i had to re do it.. took me forever to figure that one out.. hehehe..

I hope you like the new version.. it's a smaller render as well..

[geldslaw]

could you post up a rendered image,

[Stureah]

ok.. here it is.. unrared and everything..hope you like it..

[greeney]

i think the light glow across the water is too much of a line try and disperse it a little....other thsn that spot on fella ^_^ very nice

[Shipwright]

I think it's really coming together. When you're done, I'd like to see a tutorial - I'm making a ship that could use a good ocean!

The only thing I've noticed is that you can see the ripple of the waves on the horizon. In reality you would see only a sharp line with a slight curvature (the earth's curvature). The only time you would see ripples on the horizon is with massive waves.

The distance to the horizon depends on your height off the water, but at 2 meters above the water, the horizon is 3 nautical miles away (Distance to the Horizon Calculator).

A quick search comes up with a curvature of 8 inches per mile, so you could figure out your surface size and curvature based on your eye height.

Sorry for the math assault!

[Jelmer]

You're going in the right direction, the last render is a lot better and more realistic! I do agree with greeney on the specularity, decrease it a bit and also decrease the glossiness to spread it out a bit.

Furthermore, the hdri you're using is pretty good but I would still replace or adjust the background image in photoshop so there's an actual horizon, this tut could help you.

[kidlizard]

I like the water material, but you should be able to see the sun. Not just a flash of white light in the sky, especially for a sunrise or sunset scene. If your using the HDRI sky and have it instanced in the material editor you can adjust the brightness, try toning it down a little.

[greeney]

see on this how the shine on the water is dispursed? try and get that