Exporting seasurface normals as tiling bitmaps

[Steve Green]

Hi,

it would be handy to have a way to easily export the surface normals of a seasurface as a tiling bitmap.

You can render selected at the moment, but if you use choppiness the sea does not have a straight edge, so (as far as I can see) you have to have duplicate sea surfaces to fill the seam.

Thanks,

Steve

[sitnisati]

Hello Steve,

"you have to have duplicate sea surfaces to fill the seam"

This is the case about non-adaptive grid - correct ?
Can you please let me know what would be the reason (limitations) of not using adaptive SSurf and the need
of tiling non-adaptive grids ? Maybe we can do something about it.


Thanks

Kresimir

[Steve Green]

Hi Kresimir,

the main reason for using it is speed on something like aerial or wide shots of something that was quite stormy.

When using adaptive sea surfaces, I nearly always get artifacts where the geometry is simplified (particularly if the sea is quite rough)

So my idea was to render out a normal map from a single tile of a non-adaptive seasurface (or a couple of variations), then use them on a flat plane (or flat adaptive seasurface), and mix the two tiles in a noise map to minimise tiling.

That way, Max would have an easier time of eliminiating shimmering/artifacts since it would be a case of filtering maps rather than geometry.

The problem with choppiness is that on a single tile, the choppiness pushes the mesh so that it is not a straight edge, so you need to duplicate the tile to fill the gap, to get something seamless.

Hope that explains it.

Cheers,

Steve

[sitnisati]

Hello Steve,

Thanks for explanation. Can you please send an image of artifacts you are getting ?
Maybe this is something that can be easily fixed.

Regards,

Kresimir

[Steve Green]

Hi,

I've e-mailed you an example.

Thanks,

Steve