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+--- Thread: Detailed Wishlist (/showthread.php?tid=762)
Detailed Wishlist - bradon - 02-24-2009
Dreamscape is still good as it stands right now and is a great production tool, however the Ocean component I personally have found most useful and having used different ocean setups over the years, here's a wishlist of features I'd like to suggest for the future:
1. Mental Ray Displacement - first off, it would be very valuable to leverage MR's displacement capabilities. The procedural mesh is very useful, but it would be more efficient to have the option of rendering the ocean either as a high poly procedural object as it currently stands, or have a switch in the object that removes the point displacement and instead passes it to a displacement shader. There are times when either is more beneficial than the other, but as it stands the only way is via a procedural mesh. Ideally it would be nice if the procedural mesh could display a low resolution representation of the swells in the viewports, but at render time the displacement adds the finer details. The reason for this being it would be much easier to reference a lower poly object for emitting particles from and doing so from an ocean surface often doesn't require exacting detail.
2. Mental Ray Physical Sky Integration - I'd like to see the Atmospheric portion introduced as a MR shader so that the standard DS workflow can continue into the MR environment. Mental Ray is here to stay in 3dsmax and it has so many advantages over the scanline renderer at this point that it's almost limiting to be confined to the scanline renderer and it's single sample point per pixel methodology. On detailed oceans we always end up having to super-sample and filter maps into the distance and a raytracer tends to be more accurate and efficient at this. Also, motion blur is superior in Mental Ray and other raytracers.
3. Ocean Wave Enhancements - over the years I have used several different ocean toolkits, most of which were based on the Tessendorf algorithms, but some were more production useful than others. A few things that have stood out that I'd love to see added to DS are ocean wide value masking, wave matrix warping, and increased Grid Size. Ocean Wide Value Masking is a way of applying a noise mask to wave values over a large area. The specific reason for this is to create calm areas within the wave matrix, particularly seen in relatively calm seas. It also has the added benefit of helping to break up any tiling artifacts. Wave Matrix Warping addresses that issue directly by introducing a very large, low frequency distortion of the wave matrix, again helping to disrupt tiling artifacts. Lastly, we're no longer working on dual Pentium 400s with 512MB of RAM, so I think it's safe to say we'd like the option of using larger Grid Sizes than 1024x1024.
4. Map Output - I'd like the option of being able to render the resulting wave displacement/heightfield as an animated sequence of images. More importantly, I'd like to have some way of doing the same with the "stress points" that trigger foam, the purpose of which would be to emit particles for spray elements.
5. Render Element support - integration into MR *should* help facilitate this. Ideally productions will want the ability to generate separate diffuse, specular(glitter), reflection, z-depth and atmospheric passes properly with DS.
I know none of this is easy to implement and probably is quite time consuming. I'm just bringing it up based on my own production experience in the hopes that it will be a useful direction as the software further evolves.
Re: Detailed Wishlist - sitnisati - 04-29-2009
Hey Brandon,
It's great to have you here again !
Thank you for your input. There are so many things that should be done for DreamScape.
I have added those to the wishlist.
mentay ray would be nice to add, but it requires that all shaders, atmospherics, Sun light, subsurface
to be rewritten as a mental ray shader and that is not a trivial task.
So far we have FumeFX/mental ray shader and other will probably follow - depending on the interest of the user base.
Kresimir