I want to use a circular Cycles wave texture coming from a floating object. What is the math node setup to be able to control the space between the rings so they're smaller and closer around the object and get wider and farther apart as they move away from it?

If that is possible in Poser I'd like to know too.

My guess is that you will need a prop, say a primitive CONE to apply that texture to. Barring that, you won't be able to do it from the object you mention.

you might want to post up an image of what you are asking because I'm having a hard time visualizing what it is you want.

If anyone can help you with Cycles in Poser, it's ghostship2

I'm not a math dude but If I can see it I might be able to help.

I just figured out when someone posted in my black panther thread how to use cycles to put a color on back facing polys. I'm useless with cycles.

Basically I'm working with a hi-res ground plane as water. I have a flower floating on the water, and I want to have circular ripples coming from the flower. It's a closeup, but I still want the ripples to become shallower and farther apart as they move out from the center, as in this photograph of a water ripple. The more images of rippling water I look at, the more I see that it's not so much that they are steadily farther apart as they move away from the center as that there is a big variation around the object itself with some very wide rings and some narrower, and then they even out and get smaller the farther they are from the center. So it would seem I would have to introduce some sort of distortion to allow me to put some variability there, somehow? But they all graduate to shallower height as they move from the center, and fade out, so that you don't see them at all after a distance from the center.

If I use the wave texture node, I get a center circle with surrounding circles that all get smaller until they reach a uniform size as they move away from the center, like so:

I just want to make that look more natural by giving it some variability (not the distortion that's in the node, that just makes it wiggly but does nothing to change the frequency) and making it fade out the farther from the center it moves.

I wonder if I am putting too much confidence in math's ability to do stuff like that, I know there are some things that you just can't do really well with procedural nodes, like super realistic wood grain. If there's a way to do it with nodes I want to learn, but I can accept if I'm better off just painting a height map.

It's a sine wave so I looked up sine functions in 3D

http://www.hungry.com/~jamie/sine.html

z = sin(sqrt(x2+y2))

Yes, but you want an inverse square falloff of the amplitude with distance from the focus/centre. Or even a linear falloff. It just depends on what you want it to look like. If it looks right to you, then it's right. Just tell folks it's a non-newtonian fluid if they complain about variations from reality. ;-) If you use a math power node, you have infinite variability available by changing the exponent.

If you'd consider using a prop instead, there's this: https://web.archive.org/web/20200130075435/http://www.morphography.uk.vu/dlprop.html

This is what actually happens with a wave from a dropped object. It's a little bit more complicated:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dESm6VjfSNs