render fast! water
2001-12-29
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1. Downloads
2. Introduction
3. Dynamics setup
4. Shading

1. Downloads

The complete scene file (Maya ASCII, 900KB)

View the movie of the completed water (Quicktime, 374KB)

View a full-res rendered frame

2. Introduction

Probably the best way to make convincing sea water in Maya is to use an animated displacement map on a watery-textured plane. While I have found that this method produces highly realistic results, the long render times required for displacement make it impractical for many situations.

The method outlined here does not produce ultra-real water waves. Instead, it is intended for use as a shortcut for use when low, rolling waves are acceptable in a shot. Because it uses Maya's particle system it makes tweaking and previewing wave motion fast and simple.

I have not yet produced realistic fluid dynamic effects such as breaking wave tops or wakes with this method, but I'm sure it would be possible.

3. Dynamics setup

Make a high density NURBS plane (I used 50 U patches and 50 V patches). The higher the density the more choppy your final water will be.

nurbsPlane1
Name this plane "baseWater"

Make baseWater a soft body using Soft/Rigid Bodies > Create Soft Body. Under creation options specify Duplicate, Make Copy Soft. Check Hide Non-Soft Object and Make Non-Soft a Goal. Set the (Goal) Weight to 0.3.

making the soft body
This will create a new NURBS plane, identical to baseWater, with each of its CVs controlled by particles. Rename this new plane water.

Open the Outliner and expand the list under water. Here you will see the newly created particles that control the mesh. Rename them waterParticles

Outliner
Now select waterParticles and go to Fields>Turbulence. Create a new field with a magnitude of 40 and an Attenuation of 0.

Now play the simulation. The particles should move from their rest position and begin udulating rapidly. Play the animation until the surface of the water is reasonably perturbed (nice wave heights and troughs). If ncessary, adjust both the magnitude of the turbulence field and the Goal Weight of the water particles to acheive the desired wave scale.

water waves
Play the animation ahead until the water assumes a desirable state. Select the water particles and go to Solvers > Initial State > Set for Selected.

While this setup produces a sort of random, roiling effect in the water, the motion may be varied and fine tuned with the application of additional fields or per-particle attributes (not outlined here).

For my water I added an additional turbulence field with slightly smaller magnitude and higher frequency. This had the effect of further varying and randomizing the wave motion.

4. Shading

Please note: The following shader network was designed to be rendered without raytracing enabled. If you intend to raytrace your water, you will need to change many of the variables to obtain a desirable effect.

Downloads:

Here is the seawater shader:
water.ma (7KB)

Here is the hypershade view of the shader (click to view a larger version):
View large shader network

For the seawater shader(Maya ASCII) I use a layered shader to combine two separate Blinn textures. One deep blue, opaque Blinn to simulate light penetrating into the ocean depths, and one semiTransparent Blinn shader to create the effect of light reflecting off the ripples on the surface.

First open the hypershade window. Create a deep blue Blinn with high diffuse, 0.8; low Eccentricity, 0.1; and a high specular roloff, 8.0 (This is typical of shiny materials like metal and water that have very high specularity). I've shifted the specular color a bit in the blue direction, to give my water a kind of deep blue, cold, icy quality. Name this waterDepthBlinn, as it will be the lowest layer of the water shader.

Map a 2D fractal to the bump map node of waterDepthBlinn. I set the amplitude rather low (about 0.4) and the frequency ratio rather high (6.0) to extract a lot of detail out of the fractal pattern. I also increase the minimum and maximum levels (the number of recursions the computer goes through when generating the fractal) to 4.0 and 15.0, respectively.

This will simulate the very tiny ripples that scatter the light in the water. In real life these ripples are constantly in motion. To acheive this I used an expression to control the time attribute of the fractal.

In the attribute editor for the newly created fractal, check "Animated" and right click within the data field for the time attribute and select Create Expression. This will open the expression editor. In the Expression area of the editor enter the following expression:

fractal1.time += 0.002;

This very simple expression tells the computer to increment (+=) the time variable by 0.002 units each frame. This is a somewhat nontraditional way to control the time variable (normally one would simply connect the "out" time variable from the time1 node to fractal1.time) but I find it makes it easier to fine tune the motion of the ripples by controlling the increment directly.

When you playback the animation in the window, the fractal swatch should update in the hypershade window and you will see the pattern changing slowly over time.

Next make the top layer of the water:

I've adapted the Antarctic Water v1.0 shader from Highend3D for use as the top coat. The best part about this shader is its use of a circular shader to control both its transparency and its color. This creates a nice natural color variation in the water as distance from the camera increases. The shader also has its own, much smoother, bump map made using a brownian texture. This will nicely complement the higher frequency ripples created earlier.

The most important change I've made to the Antarctic shader is to plug an environment sky node into the reflected color input of the Blinn node. This will produce the varied blues and whitish reflections on the surface that will really make our water look wet.

The envsky node will have such a great effect on the color of the water surface Blinn that its actual color should beset to nearly black. Any higher luminance values will make it bloom out and appear a milky white.

Below is the attribute editor view of the new envsky1 node:

envsky1 Attributes
Once the envsky node is plugged into the reflected color of the second Blinn, it's time to make a layered shader and combine the two layers.

Create a layered shader (I've named it waterLayeredShader) and place it next to the two Blinns in the work area of the hypershade.


Create two layers by clicking in the large rectangle at the top of the attribute editor for the layered shader. Now, with the top layer highlighted (the one to the far left), drag the swatch from waterSurfaceBlinn onto the "Color" entry. Maya will make the connection.

Continue by connecting waterDepthBlinn.outColor to waterLayeredShader.inputs[2]color; and ramp2.outColor to waterLayeredShader.inputs[1]transparency. The transparency field for each layer in the layered shader is analogous to a layer mask or opacity value in Adobe Photoshop. Before closing the attribute editor make sure that the transparency for layer 2 (waterDepthBlinn) is set to zero and "Compositing Flag" is set to "Layer Shaders".

One last thing that must be done to the layeredShader is a workaround to make sure shadow passes render properly. Connect the "out Matte Opacity R" channel on one of the Blinns to the in Matte Opacity on the Layered Shader. Otherwise any shadow passes will render the layered shader as a large all-black swatch.

That's it! Apply the new layered shader to the water plane and the simulation is ready to render -- and render it will, much faster than using displacement.

View a rendered frame or watch the movie (Quicktime, 374KB) of the completed water.

If you have any questions or comments on this tutorial please email me.