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Tutorial: Continued Experiments with Procedural Waves (Patreon)

Published:
2021-07-16 02:24:59
Edited:
2021-07-16 10:59:17
Imported:
2026-06
Tags:

Content

[in which Ian discovers "oh the Waves texture makes good Waves who'da thought."]edit: ALSO uh just saw that flooding fairly similar to my little demo is happening and a hundred+ people are dead?? That wasn't me trying to be, like, bizarrely topical; it just wasn't on my radar- stay safe out there!

I have a lot of water stuff I want to do in the next year, so I figured I should try to figure out some slightly better water solutions than just slapping a musgrave on a plane!   It's still MOSTLY just slapping a musgrave on a plane. But it's other stuff, too.I still want to figure out some more dynamic stuff, like big ol' ship's wakes and such, but this'll work a bit better for a base :D. 

Files

Continued Experiments with Procedural Waves

[in which Ian discovers "oh the Waves texture makes good Waves who'da thought."] I have a lot of water stuff I want to do in the next year, so I figured I should try to figure out some slightly better water solutions than just slapping a musgrave on a plane! It's still MOSTLY just slapping a musgrave on a plane. But it's other stuff, too. I still want to figure out some more dynamic stuff, like big ol' ship's wakes and such, but this'll work a bit better for a base :D.

Comments

Found And Explained

and watching the video now, i see you have a pretty good grasp on it. foot in my mouth moment :)

IanHubert

Oh! No not at all- that's a fantastic method- I'd always thought the ocean modifier looked amazing, but was too heavy for large scale stuff, so this is great to know! Actually, I haven't even poked at the ocean modifier in a minute; probably should have done that before making this video :P

Ahmed Ali

Great stuff as usuall Ian!

IanHubert

Oh hey! that’s cool!! Thanks! I’m curious to see how it compares to the “mixrgb” method!

Dawson Henderson

Hmm, my comment actually just disappeared so I guess I will just paste it right down here haha :) Hi Ian! I don't know if you're familiar with using a driver in Blender for adding keyframes or not because I don't think I've ever seen you use them. SOOOO just in case you DO NOT know what they are, I will not explain how it works on the technicality side because I do not know the specifics BUT I can tell you the essentials of how it works. All you do is, for example, when animating the water by moving the Z in the mapping node, instead of adding a keyframe, moving the water, adding another keyframe, and then setting it to linear extrapolation, all you have to do is add, "#frame" and this will make the number move up one unit every frame. But obviously, that is WAY too fast so what you wanna do is just divide the frame by a reasonable size and it will just slow it down. To do this you just do, "#frame/100" I used 100 for example but you can obviously use any number you need. Hopefully, this helped you out if you didn't know about it, it can come in handy quite a bit, or at least it does for me. By the way, I just wanna let you know that you are such an inspiration to to me and honestly you are an absolutely mind-blowing genius! You have inspired me to just go around modeling every little thing I see and turning it into my own little version of it and it's so fun, I use your piston textures way too much tho hahaha! But seriously, they are great textures!

Pete Burges

Water's a real rabbit-hole and usually I run out of time long before I get it looking exactly as I would like. Getting the surface right is OK but what if you want foam on the shorelines or wakes? It's like, how long is a piece of string...? Looking at your video I think something like this should be the standard tutorial for creating water in Blender. You're using all the included tools in the best way instead of relying on a plugin to sort it out.

Found And Explained

Did i just... teach the legendary Ian Hubert something new? what reality is this *wakes up*

Paul Spooner

Those microwaves are called capillary waves, and it turns out they are rounded on top and pointed in the troughs instead of the other way around for the large-scale gravity waves. I learned about them in my University fluid dynamics class, it turns out we are at the intersection of multiple different scales of wave action and that accounts for the complexity that you noted. And don't get started on wave trains, where the front wave fades out and new waves are added in the back.

Bakamoichigei

Fantastic results, Ian! I can't wait to try this myself... It's been a while since I messed around with this sort of thing. A while back I was cleaning up an old storage drive when I stumbled upon part of an image sequence I'd rendered in Lightwave 3D back in the early aughts, based on a 'stormy ocean' tutorial I'd followed... (The scene relies entirely on animated procedural textures for materials and displacement, pretty nifty stuff for the time!) I remember it taking *several minutes per frame* for my workstation to churn it out at just 720x480, lol... Now the game Sea of Thieves has literally the best CG water I have *ever seen* and the average gaming rig can render it in real-time at 4k with HDR. Man, how times have changed! 😂 Enjoy some 20 year old CG tinkerings: http://media.giantpachinkomachineofdoom.com/blog/2018/04/ocean.gif

Zeke Faust

There's an addon called flowmap which lets you paint flow vectors in the texture painter, it's pretty cool. Especially for your last example where you'd figure water would probably be flowing and conforming to the walls of the buildings edit: here's the link! https://clemensbeute.gumroad.com/l/heZDT

Zeke Faust

Love it, reminds me of some PS2 games I used to play :)

Kolupsy

I would avoid that whenever possible. The bump adds a ton of compilation time so it’s best to use only one of them if possible. Also reducing the dimensions and detail values of procedural textures helps a lot. And lastly you should always avoid using drivers directly in the shader editor because it’ll kill performance with large node trees

conorsvfx

Anyone know how to get reflections on the plane in eevee?

IanHubert

AH YEAH! That's a great tip! I've used #frame sometimes, but not for stuff like this- hot damn yeah, I like being able to drag the keyframes around to easily dial in the speed, but my guess is it wouldn't be hard to get used to tweaking the divisor, either! I'll try to keep this in mind :D And ah thanks!!!! That's awesome to hear! Very glad the piston textures are useful, too- I wish I'd make them slightly higher res (actually- maybe it'd make sense to run them through an AI uprezer?) Thanks again!

IanHubert

Man yeah water's wild- simulating surfaces like this procedurally is always surprisingly easy, but then most OTHER things seem impossible without, like, a gargantuan fluid sim or whatever. I keep wanting to use a drone to film some foamy shoreline video textures, but every time I get to the ocean I re-remember that the "ocean waves crashing into the beach" zone is actually hundreds and hundreds of feet long (instead of the little 'crashing wave' infographic I have in my head :P)- some day, though!!

Zeke Faust

Enable screen space reflections or use the reflection plane light probe

IanHubert

HUH! Cool! I stopped my research too quick! I totally figured the macro/micro all were basically the same thing. Also oooo- definitely going to have to check out a youtube video about wave trains!

Dawson Henderson

I have actually thought about running them through an AI uprezer but haven't gotten around to it. I think it would be very beneficial since I use it for almost all of my little random bits! I'm also trying to find some more textures to kinda add to the piston textures so that I can have one big atlas of great textures! I love the idea of not having to go through my files to grab different textures and images all the time because sometimes I can spend probably TOO long just trying to find a specific texture that fulfills my needs haha!

IanHubert

DANG that looks good, though! And it has foam!

IanHubert

Oooo- there are a lot of possible answers to that! You have to make sure you have a non-rough glossy shader, and that you're in rendered view- there are a lot of other things that can change the quality of the reflection beyond that, but you should see it reflecting SOMETHING, ideally (assuming you have an environment to reflect :P)- any of that help??

IanHubert

YES!! I've been playing with that! You can probably hear my voice falter in the video when I'm thinking, "should I get into flowmaps??"- it'd be PERFECT for a situation like that. Have you played with it at all?

conorsvfx

Yes enabling screenspace reflections fixed it, I already had the non rough glossy shader done but screenspace reflections fixed it. Thanks so much for replying so fast!! Side question, do you have any tips or tutorials on photoscanning?

Zeke Faust

Yep, it's super cool! Especially when you get it hooked up to a shader and start painting the flow in realtime. If only there was a way to make it procedural and reactive. Maybe there is to a certain degree...

chunky8bit

huh... well I guess now i know!

Davide Miozzi

I don't even use Blender anymore, but yes, I'm so glad I joined your Patreon!

Anonymous

Wonderful tutorial!

Bakamoichigei

Yes! If I recall correctly, it did something like using a clamped copy of the wave displacement texture as a mask for the 'foam', so it only forms at the tops of the waves. That tutorial yielded some pretty impressive effects for its time. 😁

Justin

Hey Ian what brand of tablet do you have in the background there? Also thats some sweet water waves...

Mornarion

Plz, someone save Castaway Ian, he looks calm but he's in some serious trouble! I think he's Cowboy Ian's cousin, and they share the same genetic cold blood. (Also, amazing tutorial, the quality/video length ratio is off the charts ;D)

Anderson Atlas Author

can't wait for the boat and the wake bit. I really need a solid solution. I messed with painting wake dynamically but it only worked when in the background and a quick shot. I tried particles, but that failed, too. ur solutions are premo so I'll wait for it. thanks!

One of Many

I don't know If you've seen this and it covers some of the same ground, but this is a really neat analysis on some of the water effects in Super Mario Galaxy. I know it's a bit more cartoony but I think it gives a really neat insight in to how some simple textures and actions can do some very heavy lifting. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8rCRsOLiO7k

Tom Smith

It's also good to tweak the roughness with the Layer Weight node. Invert facing and output to roughness to create a Fresnel effect so that when viewing water at an angle it's more reflective and more transparent when viewing from above.

Nathan Vegdahl

In addition to what Kolupsy already said, it's also a bit less numerically stable to chain bump nodes. It almost certainly won't matter in practice, but it doesn't hurt to avoid it just in case. Bump maps are just height maps, so what I usually do is put a multiply node after each one to scale its height, and then add them together with a bunch of add nodes. Then I just have a single bump node at the end of all that.

Tolga Katas

working great here, thank you, wave texture for making waves love it!! hehe ;-)

Tolga Katas

looks awesome, I also animated the distortion on the noise texture for the foam

Justin

Thank you!

Rain Bustamante

Curious what limitations you had compared to using the Ocean Modifier?

Alex White

I might be wrong on this, but if you go back to the burger post, I think he goes over the basics of the basics of photo-scanning (or maybe the succulent post, I'm not sure). There is also a good tutorial by Peter France on youtube that you can take a look at as well

IanHubert

I really should experiment more with the ocean modifier- I've assumed it didn't work as great for huge to-the-horizon shots, or scenes that aren't the typical, "big waves in the ocean", but I haven't experimented with it in ages and it could be a lot more nuanced than I think! Someone else above linked to a tutorial where the ocean modifier was used to generate a normal map sequence that they were able to tile to the horizon with excellent results, too, which seemed cool!

Found And Explained

I used that tutorial above, and was able to render a huge ocean to the horizon with animated waves (although not interacting with anything) 60 seconds per frame in Cycles X. So very do able.

Sreliata ♥

Oh my god.. this is eevee?! Really? O.O

Harvey Miller

Hey Ian, A couple of cool things regarding the foam that i discovered after doing you tutorial that i think you may wanna include when you revisit water: 1. In addition to animating the foam as you outlined... also try animating the distortion of the noise texture of the foam. have the value oscillate back and forth extremely slowly. it makes it look like its interacting with the water a more. you can preview this effect but holding shift and slowly moving the value up and down 2. have the animated direction of the current of the foam match the same direction as the waves but have the current of the foam be half the speed. this feels more realistic as sea foam isnt as heavy as water and usually sits on top of the water. hope these minor tweaks helped. thanks for this tute. cant wait for more

RetroRadtacular

The shot you had by the end is so solid. Water looks REAL good, and not too difficult to approach! Gonna mess around with this a ton. Anytime I feel like I don't have the motivation to continue learning, watching a vid of yours brings me right back. Thanks!