Ocean animation

[ChrisVis]

Hey bulwerk!

Thanks for sharing the scene!
I tried to play with the hot4D plugin some month ago, but C4D happend to crash with earlier versions of c4doctane, when the libfftw*.dll files were in the Cinema Directory, or at least the plugin did not work with octane.

So very exciting to see, that it is working now!!

I did render some Stills with different lighting setups (sunlight and hdri), and I think it looks really amazing realistic, even with DL kernel.
But there is some hotpixel problem with the ocean material, because of the bump channel and the turbulence. Any idea how to get this fixed without loosing realism? (beside hotpixel removal, which reduces details and sharpeness)

Sunlight

HDRI

[JessicaVines]

How long are you renders at the moment?

Hot pixels can be removed using external tools in Photoshop for example with reasonable success. Sometimes better than the built in hotpixel slider. But you will typically degrade the image.

Sometimes the only perfect solution is to simply cook for longer, which i understand may not be feasible for an animation. I guess it's the nature of the beast when dealing with unbiased path-tracing. Hoping the Octane team can look at improving this in future whether by noise reduction algorithms or enhancements the the kernels in areas of extreme bokeh and highlights...

Images look great by the way.

[Tugpsx]

Very impressive, movement looks believable. Thanks for sharing.

[Bulwerk]

Chris Vis

Not sure how to get rid of all the fireflys myself. "Luckily" compression from vimeo kinda hides it.
I let my scene cook for 4 minutes. which is actually much higher than I would expect from a scene like this. Maybe just lowering bump strength would help allot?

cheers

[ChrisVis]

Hi JessicaVines and Bulwerk,

the Rendertime for each Still was about 8-10 Minutes I think (1000 maxsamples in HD 1920x1080) with 1xGTX780Ti and 1xGTX580. Didn`t turn on my turbobox for that, so I should get good enough results for animation with all GPU power On)

In my experience the fireflies happen in bright reflective areas when using bump mapping, and therefore it increases rendertime a lot to get clean images. Sometimes it never gets clean, for certain lighting situations.
Removing fireflies in Photoshop (with Imagenomic Noiseware for example) doesn`t work good enough without degrading and flatening the image and loosing lots of detail (at least for those stills here). Massive use of the hotpixel slider in octane also degrades the image details.

To lowering the bump strenght helps with the fireflies and the rendertime but also ruins the realism. In fact this scenes organic look lives from the bump mapping of the ocean water material. Try to deactivate the bump mapping and you will see that all the nice surface details are gone.

Maybe and hopefully we see some improvements with octane 2.0 and the displacement capabilities, which might be even a better way to achieve the water surface, than doing it with bump mapping.
But there is definetly something going on in the renderkernel, that increases fireflies in certain situations (expecially with bump mapping and glossy or spectral materials), that hopefully can and will be optimized.

Greetings,
ChrisVis

[ROUBAL]

In this kind of animation, I think that instead of removing them, fireflies could be used to get a nice effect, if you apply a glare using the post prod panel. You will get some blinking stars instead of simple noise. watch it full size to see the effect.

I applied such effect in this video with water :

[Carsten]

I guess the only thing I would add is a dirt node on the surface, driving a setup that also adds the foam around the bouy and the posts.

Really awesome shader.
I got the same idea as gordonrobb but haven't tried it yet. I quess there might be a problem with self occlusion? An option for the dirt would be helpful (e.g. self occlusion only/ other objects/ all objects) so an additional foam layer would only affect the areas where the water washes around the objects like the posts.

[voon]

Hm I try to recreate an ocean material like this ... I assume it's just a specular material with a bit of SSS or so, and a second glossy material with the waterfoam texture. But I'm a noob to materials and have a problem with the textured material ... the texture is grayscale, wth white foman and various grays that were the water of the original ... if I put that over the Specular SSS material, it will kill its transparency etc obviously ... how do I get this foam texture to be sort of transparent where the water is? I assume some Alpha mode something ... but I don't know how to do that.

My attempt so far (preview quality, tiny resolution and just 100 samples per frame):



But the texture dulls out the transparency.