My idea is to use a large mesh disk as an ocean surface. The diameter could be 500km so that the horizon line looks real also from a high camera. The ship will be approx. 150m and I would like to deform the mesh per control points so that I get typical waves around the ship.
The problem is how to get a dense mesh around the ship (for example one control point every 0.5m) but a low poly count far away in the back round and there should be no polygon density jump, since it would cause mapping issues. Best the density decrease non linear.
Attached a screenshot of a mesh with constant density and quite limited diameter.
From my point of view, since I use Vray esiest way to prepare such disc is with blender, apply ocean modifier and import mesh as Vray proxy. I know Rhino may have performance problems with such dense mesh object inside document. For sure avoid using surfaces with Rhino displacement. Below is some test animations. Water mesh made in blender. Rendering in Rhino.
@mlukasz87 interesting approach. Can you please elaborate a bit more on the approach that you follow?
When i need to make water animations i currently export my model and continue in blender.
I have failed trying to find solution without Blender for this problem, for quality I needed. Vray for Rhino provides simple procedural texture for sea, but for me it was not enough. I think I have sent you this example in past in private message. Below animated Vray sea procedural texture with Rhino camera animation
Vray as well as few other Rhino plugins provides option to import mesh proxies during renering only. Preview in document is very simplified to not cause performance issues. Such meshes can be static, or dynamic alembic files which includes information about mesh animation. Static or animated meshes can be prepared in Blender.
But at some point with this approach You have to ask yourself: will it be better to do all of that in Blender instead? My opinion: If you need fine animation go for blender. If you need few static renders stay in Rhino.
I also have found that even for simple renders with sea water lot of ship designs are rendered in mesh modelelers, not in Rhino (to implement white foam, proper wake wave etc).
@Micha I would propose to use a ground plane with water material and much smaller mesh. In GH I guess it would be a few components to get a modified density mesh like this. Don’t have much time now to help maybe @HS_Kim would have a second to propose some solution I’m sure it would be spot-on.
If ship is for example at anchor (standing still), there is no current, than there would be no wake waves. If weather is calm, no fine displacement methods are needed on sea surface. For this scenario good bump map may do job done, with eventuall local displacement in center as you proposed at beginning.
EDIT: check attached file. You have there 2 meshes, outer and inner. You may try to scale them and subdivide as needed, and later join. Round disc may be enough to trick and simulate horizon. seamesh.3dm (392.5 KB)
@mlukasz87 Very nice simple disk shapes - rectangular in the center and polar around.
Yesterday I tried an other way also - a large mesh disk and at the center I extracted one polygon and subdivided it several times. Here applied a wake wave patter mixed with standard wave pattern and circle soft blend per Rhino displacement. Additional my ocean material got a large scale wave normal map and fine detailed bump. Plus a foam texture at the diffuse slot. So, I have four types of “waves” now. Attached a test rendering - the ship isn’t by me so I greyed it.
I decide me again manual wake modeling since the Rhino displacement allowed a quite realistic result. Limited to an area around the ship it’s not to heavy. I tried V-Ray displacement but I was to heavy, slow and not easy to control. My impression is that a high polycount of the model is no problem for the used GPU rendering, but render displacement can be easy a problem.
Attached my used maps, maybe it helps other users too.
