Foam-question

[breuer]

Hey all. Im new to this forum and posting my first problem/issue

We¨re doing a big production where I work and im gonna need quite a few rough-sea shots. Thing is this... Im really pleased with the way my sea is looking now, got a nice and choppy kinda north-sea looking animation, but really want to use mental ray to render this. And this is where the problem enters : I cant get the foam to map correctly on my mental ray shader. It seems the dreamscape foam shader, that is only available in scanline mode is supplying som kind of coordinates/uv and since this shader cant be used in MR im very unsure on how to deal with this problem. Ive tried applying a planar UVmap and its looking pretty good, but the foam doesnt match the waves any more and its really hard to match by hand. Any ideas on how to solve this issue? Any help will be received with alot of gratitude.

/Breuer

[sitnisati]

Hello,

We'd have to write a special DreamScape shaders for mental ray in order to render it.
At this moment we have only FumeFX - mental ray shader.

Kresimir

[Steffster]

Hello, i am having the same problem. What i have done here is i use a separate mental ray shader for the sea and then i use the already rendered out foam map to work as a mask map on top of the mental ray sea shader. The problem that i have here is that the foam map doesnt apply the mesh the same way it did with the dreamscape material, wich is weird since the material shouldnt have a say, the unwrapping should. Or?

[sitnisati]

Foam map and bump map computations are directly connected to the SeaSurface object,
and to render them properly in mental ray, we should write a mental ray shader.

Regards,

Kresimir Tkalcec

[Steffster]

Ok, thank you for the reply. I truly hope that you will be able to make mental ray shaders for us MR users

I seem to have found a workaround for us MR users, its not optimal since you will have to use planar UVW map, wich makes it impossible to correctly texture underneath the wave crest, but its the only way that i know of.

What i did was i deleted the Dreamscape sun and put in a normal Omni and set the Multiplier to 0,0
(not sure if this next part is needed but i didnt have time to experiment) then i deleted all atmosphere effects and, within Dreamscape: SeaMaterial, i set all colors to black, set Sky Color to DreamScape Sky and set Underwater Color to Dreamscape SubSurface. (i think that is it)
And then i render a Top View of the ocean, wich leaves me with a black and white image where the ocean is completely black, and the foam is white. If you apply this to the MR Blend map, you should have foam at most of the right places.

Try it out and tell me if this helps or if you found a better way