Back to the Ocean Shader

So I thought about the ocean shader again and think there is a lot more that I can try and that I can do. It seems to be the most logical method at the moment because it is part of Maya so not expensive and would cut rendering time down by so much. I think it is definitely worth another try.

Firstly, I had to create a river bed for the realflow test so to save time I decided to use that as my base. I added a plane and then assigned the ocean shader to it. I tried what I did last time and that was to just mess around with the settings and see what I could achieve.

This was the outcome.



Again not at all what I was looking for, Firstly it does not look like a river t all and just looks like my previous attempts which did not work out the way I wanted at all.

So at this point I am wondering what I could do to make this time around better and different. I decide to look at some reference images. I have no idea why I didn't do this before but I managed to find some really good images showing me the ripples and tides of the river.

This immediately showed me where I was going wrong. For a start the waves I had created were far too large and secondly, The waves I have created were only going in one direction making it look more like a tide that you would see on a beach than on a river. 

I really needed to make this look like a good river before I could try to do anything else so I constantly kept changing the different settings. This was a really long process because I had to keep rendering to see if my settings were successful. They were still coming out the same so I decided to research the settings a bit more and to look into what they mean. Whilst doing this I found the "create ocean" option in Maya. Just to try it, I clicked on it and it created a realistic ocean straight away. I started playing around with the settings and saw that there was a ocean preview plane on the ocean shader meaning that I didn't have to keep rendering and saved me a lot of time. I then began to experiment with how to add this ocean preview plane to my own scene. When I did this successfully, it made a huge difference. I could now see what the settings were effecting and how the river would look without having to render. This helped me to figure out which settings I was moving incorrectly and how to make the river look a lot better. Just with the help of the ocean preview plane, I managed to create this river instead.

The river now looks a lot better and more realistic to how a river would really flow. It look slow but it also looks really strong which is the look I  am trying to achieve. This is only a test but i think it really works in the environment and I am confident that we can make it look good using the ocean shader.

I now need to figure out how to make things move through it.