(BTW- I had no crashing problems with these- 512MB Ram on an older P-III, but the ATI graphics card drivers are up-to-date!)

That's cool, Veritas. Is that a new feature of Vue 5? How long did they take to render?

These were done at 1024 x 768 and took an average of 20 minutes. Because Procedural Terrains scaled up to a HUGE size are such a NEW animal for Vue, even the renderer slightly "freaks-out" and reports initially that it will take "9 hours", then that will quickly drop to "5 hours", and finally down to just minutes! I think the Vue renderer has some type of intelligence that "kicks-in" --once it determines that it will be rendering a "point of view", and NOT 100 square miles of ocean! (heh!) This is what is so UNIQUE about Procedural Terrains- they scale their detail to match the camera view. So- don't let these new procedural materials SCARE you with huge initial rendering times. Vue 5 is just making some calculations and will adjust the render accordingly... Also know- Procedural Terrains are not at all like regular terrains or meshes. You cannot scale-out a regular terrain or mesh (like 100 square miles) and have it look or behave the same way as a Procedural Terrain. TOTALLY different animal. And what is nice about them is that a big scale does NOT mean a big file size- since they are mathematical representations and NOT meshes, etc. BUT- be forewarned that you should have current, up-to-date graphics card drivers installed. These new procedural terrains can make some older drivers cause a crash in Vue 5. I used an ATI Radeon 8500 with no problems because the drivers are very recent. One other warning- don't try to apply a photo texture to a scaled-out Procedural Terrain like this. I did and Vue immediately Locked-UP. I realized as soon as I did it that it was stupid --as it vastly changes the render equasion and overloads it. Stick with the "procedure" and it should be o.k.

good looking examples veritas, some of them even looks realy good :)

They were ALL rendered in Standard mode. I'm rendering a couple now in Global Ambience mode and they look much better, but take about twice as long. I'm going to try at least one with Global Illumination, but I suspect it will take about 4-5 hours- so I'll do that over night. But it should look REALLY good!

The waves look fantastic, one thing I thought I'd add is that when you mix water materials, the renderer has to calculate lightrays bouncing off one and then calculate how they bounce off the other, this is why the render was a little slower, since it effectively doubles the render calculations necessary for the render.

No kidding on the graphics card drivers. I was using a driver for my ATI Radeon 9800 that was one version older from the newest, and it completely froze up Windows XP SP2 when I opened the above Vue waves file. After loading the newest driver it stopped locking up.

Very nice Veritas!!! ;) I' relly like your settings for the 'choppy' water. All renders looks god. The one in post 5 shows a worm locking pattern. Is it visible also in the fullsize render or is it created when scaling down the image? By the way, I'm currently looking into making it possible to adjust the shape of the wave. The current shape locks god for the more turbulent water but I would also like the function to be able to create smooth waves.

I hope when you guys have mastered this you write up a tut for it....so far I'm trying to follow, but am getting lost, with all the filters/nodes/proced. stuffs. Thanks :)

Here's a Global Illumination render, done in final, of the above Tropical water. Actually very little difference considering that it took about FOUR hours for 1024 x 768! So forget about ocean renders at high quality settings- it doesn't seem worth it for most purposes. Stick with standard settings and just do some post-work in Photoshop instead!

Hellborn- the previous above water with the strange lines in it was the "Wavy Water". I don't like the look myself, but maybe a better bump map than the default one could make it look better. The bump map also seems to add to the rendering time so it probably isn't worth the extra time in most cases...

The version I'm currently working on will allow for some more controll using the constant values. If it works as I hope there vill be controls for: 1. Primary waves width/Length relationship. 2. Primary waves height. 3. Primary waves shape. 4. Secondary waves scale. 5. Secondary waves height. 6. Secondary waves shape. When done I will give the foam a second chance, starting with a simple terrain and then try to match the shapes with the material. This as the main problem in my last attemp failed mostly because I not could figure out how and if the coordinate system matches up between terrain and material. Could be that there will be a tutorial also ;)

I've noticed that if you try and switch the mapping from "World" to "Object" this will cause an immediate crash of Vue 5--in fact, it disappears INSTANTLY! Is there anything about these Procedural Terrains that REQUIRE they be World Mapped? Also- looking forward to seeing the new model. If you like, I can email any of the texture maps I've made- but you probably can do all this a lot better than I can...

I would be intersted in the textures but I think it will have to wait until I'm finished with the functions. By the way, where did you try to change the mapping? The procedural terrain seems to several problems with stability. And the worse is that I can't find any specific behavior that makes it crash. Yesterday I just tried to drag a node and Vue vanished from my desktop ;( If you find anything that is repetable please report it to E-ON.

Can you put some white on the highest peaks group? I think there might be a problem with shader function that do not put white on only the edge of peaks. I will look into it tonight and hope there is workaround. Other suggestion the ocean need some light through transparent.

It also renders very fast compared to other water materials.

Actually the last thing I want on ocean waves is TRANSPARENCY-- It slows rendering down tremendously! Especially because Vue has to calculate ALL the light transparencies going off into the distance.

Hellborn- When you open the advanced Materials Editor the Mapping is on the top right, just below the check boxes for Cast Shadows, Receive Shadows...

Just thought I'd let you know...I tired a mapped pic on a procedural terrain & Vue did NOT crash :)

In my case it was probably the fact that I have scaled the terrain out over a HUGE area. That's a LOT of tiling to calculate. I have been using my older P-III with 512MB ram for these water tests. My Athlon 64 with 1.5 GB probably can handle it much better. I'll try it later when I get the chance...

OK Veritas ;) As you talked about stability problem I thought you where talking about the terrain procedural as that's where I have found most instability, not strang I not found the 'mapping'. ;) I will upload the new procedural terrain this evening. Please play with it and let me know if you think it's better or worse than the old one. GWeb: No problem to put white on the highest tops but it don't look that god as it creates a mountain look. What I really want to do is to apply it to the ridges or at least get some white also on the smaller waves so it not only appears on the highest tops by using height. In my first try I had no succes in matching the color to the shape of the waves and I could not figure out why. Some new tests yesterday did however show up in the correct places so either I did something wrong or the terrain function did go nuts. When editing the terrain procedural function it actually goes nuts now and then. Not a big problem when you realize that it has happend, but if you don't you could wast hours fiddling with the settings. What seems to fix most of it, is to click the reset button in the terrain editor. If it's greyed out, try to open the procedural function editor and then close it again. After the terrain editor refreshes itself the resetbutton usuall gets aktivated.