Personal project. I have been out of 3D for millions of years. But I love playing.
Model from Cgtrader - though I've been removing parts and remodeling different sections - ultimately will give more control over textures.
This is really fast WIP. Next steps are:
1. Have problems making infinite ocean - you can see a bit of this at horizon - becomes very apparent when camera is at steeper angle. Have large plane just underneath the sub-divided hot4d plane. Not sure its its simply a matter of tweaking shader on infinite plane, to remove boundary.
2. Wake
Always the wake. Now, if I was a Houdini guru, problem solved. I also don't have Realflow. So my first thoughts are to use combination of X-particles, especially at bow, and maybe use AE to produce animated overall wake for length of ship, and especially trailing the stern. Im sure this won't be simple. 3. Funnel smoke. X-particles (4) all the way. Shouldn't be that difficult.
4. Improve textures on ship overall. Experiment with grain in AE. Tweak ocean? Ocean can always be tweaked, I suspect!
5. This particular file is about 4-5 min/frame. Not bad. Compared to using Physical, which was 1-1/2! Yikes! 1080 ti & 1070. i7 4 core @ 4 ghz. Nothing super special. However, I haven't played with the AI denoting that much. I wonder how much i can speed up and not sacrifice detail?
Anyway, looking forward.
Im curious if anyone can answer - short of getting a MB that can hold 3 cards - plus case, what is involved in network rendering? How well does it work, and if people know, what is the extra cost license wise.