water displacement options in Redshift...or.... writing .exr maps out with the aaOceanDeformer plugin.

[ryan harrington]

I'm on a job that has adopted Redshift and it's all smiles...

However we are suprisingly short of options for water displacement. So if you have a magic bullet, please clue me in.

So far the most promising option seems to be to write out animated map from aaOcenDeformer. It's possible I just need to look harder, but I haven't found relevant documentation yet and have little time to play with it.

Anyone done this successfully from Maya?

Cheers,

R

[sid]

I'm fortunate enough to work with the chap who made this shader (Amaan Akram), so asked him for you!

(17:32:21) Amaan Akram: https://bitbucket.org/amaanakram/aaocean/downloads
(17:32:29) Amaan Akram: it comes with windows builds only
(17:32:56) sid: So using this version, is it relatively simple to write the exr sequence?
(17:33:24) Amaan Akram: in maya?
(17:33:28) Amaan Akram: yes
(17:33:43) Amaan Akram: you just set up the shader, and there's a tab called 'file output'
(17:34:04) Amaan Akram: you need to set an expression for the current frame so that the generated EXR sequence has the right frame name padding

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[ryan harrington]

Hi Sid,

Thanks for that...I'd love to say it's working fine but I'm not having much joy.  

The deformer example and the Eigen example both work, so it appears to be installed correctly.  

Plugging time into the frame counter is obvious...it's the rest of it that I'm missing.

 I'm getting errors whichever slot I plug the data shader into a shading group (with or without an intermediate displacement node).

Sourcing and calling the AEaaOceanDeformerTemplate Script throws an error (I'm away from Maya right now so I can't copy paste it, I believe it was  a 'wrong number of arguments' fail).

If Amaan has an example scene with the deformer hooked up to the shader, and that plugged into a Shading group I'd love to see it.

Sorry the feedback isn't a bit more verbose, I'm wearing too many hats at work I'm only getting stolen moments to play with it.

  

I imagine it's simple if you wrote it :)

Thanks to you both,

R

[Sid]

Okay, I'm gonna see if I can get Amaan involved for you..

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[Sid]

From Amaan: 

Hi Sid

The Deformer does not write exr maps. The shaders for Arnold and Mental do. There is also a shell/terminal application that will write them out too.

Usually you make a Deformer scene, play with settings and once you are okay with the Deformer, you just copy over all the settings into the shader or the shell command. The only parameter to change is the resolution, which you increase.

Please add me to the list. However, I am in Bournemouth today so will be unable to reply immediately.

I really need to add Maya docs.

On 5 Dec 2014, at 00:46, ryan harrington <ryanowenh...@gmail.com> wrote:

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[Amaan Akram]

Hi Ryan,

Thanks for inviting me to this list!

Please let me know if you have an issues with writing out vector displacement maps as outlined above.

amaan

[Jan Ziemann]

Hi Amaan,

thanks for this great plugin, your OceanSuite looks really good. I had a small try with it and writing out displacement maps worked flawless but I couldn't find a command line flag for repeat time. And I assume the flag --velocity probably corresponds to wave size in the deformer?
Could you say something about how the raw foam in the alpha channel of the written exrs relates to the colorSetVal, colorSetVec of the derformer. It looks like the alpha channel is the colorSetVal. Would it be useful to write out colorSetVec as well?
On a side note, rendering the displacement maps in vray doesn't work but that seems to be a vray problem as they render fine in mental ray. I think vray doesn't like vector displacement maps in object space at the moment.

Thanks for your time,
jan

[ryan harrington]

I'm thinking I need to check my file placements as it seems like something isn't hooked up right...I've not been able to look at it over the weekend, I'll try to get a bit of time with it this afternoon/early evening. 

Thanks for joining the group Amaan and for making the connection for us Sid.

R

[Amaan Akram]

Hi Jan, Ryan

Jan, thanks -- you are right. RepeatTime is missing from the terminal version. I'll add it in the next update

Velocity does indeed correspond to wave size. I need to resolve this descrepency at some point. Wave Size makes more intuitive sense, but the original paper describes it as velocity, which can be confused with wave speed.

As for ColorSetVal, those are eigenvalues that tell you where a wave is about to peak. In Softimage ICE or Houdini VOPS, that information can be used to emit spray particles. The ColorSetVector contains eigenvectors that contain the direction in which to emit those spray particles. 

Perhaps you guys can tell me how useful you would find the above eigenvalues/vectors. I am not that experienced with maya workflows and had assumed that without a procedural particle system, it would be too involved to work with the eigens.

thanks

amaan

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[ryan harrington]

Hi Amaan, 

I'd love to have sorted this out and given better feedback but we have hundreds of shots delivering on Christmas eve and there is a lot to do. Another artist set up a more hacky layered texture method and it's looking like it'll do what we need for now.

I'm still interested to know how you plug in the displacement to a Shading Group? didn't work for me so far.

There is talk of another episode and that will likely involve a fair bit more water, barring that, I'd like to get it working for a personal project, so I'll pick it up again.

It looks like a great implementation, and the deformer is super fast.

Thanks for making yourself available.

Ryan

[Amaan Akram]

Hi Ryan

Sorry you are having trouble hooking up the displacement shader. I should have added a sample scene.

You need to connect aaocean shader to a vector displacement shader in mtoa. I believe mtoa ships with one. That vector displacement shader then connects to the shading group. I will send a screenshot when I get home.

You need to set up the vector displacement shader to use signed encoding

Amaan

[Jan Ziemann]

Hi Ryan,

I gave redshift a quick try yesterday and setup a really basic ocean scene. I baked the displacement with Amaan's terminal application. Feel free to have a look at the attached scene file (Maya 2015 and the latest redshift demo). Disclaimer: First time redshift user here.

Sidenote: It turns out that VRay indeed does not render object space vector displacement maps that are not ptex.

Jan

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[ryan harrington]

Hi Amaan, I was trying to plug the aaOceanDataShader into a Mental Ray shading group for Mental Ray...does the data shader need to be connected to anything to bake outputs?

Thanks Jan, I'll have a look shortly :)

R

 

 

Am 11.12.2014 um 21:05 schrieb Amaan Akram:

Hi Ryan

Sorry you are having trouble hooking up the displacement shader. I should have added a sample scene.

You need to connect aaocean shader to a vector displacement shader in mtoa. I believe mtoa ships with one. That vector displacement shader then connects to the shading group. I will send a screenshot when I get home.

You need to set up the vector displacement shader to use signed encoding

Amaan

On 11 Dec 2014 19:49, "ryan harrington" <ryanowenh...@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi Amaan, 

I'd love to have sorted this out and given better feedback but we have hundreds of shots delivering on Christmas eve and there is a lot to do. Another artist set up a more hacky layered texture method and it's looking like it'll do what we need for now.

I'm still interested to know how you plug in the displacement to a Shading Group? didn't work for me so far.

There is talk of another episode and that will likely involve a fair bit more water, barring that, I'd like to get it working for a personal project, so I'll pick it up again.

It looks like a great implementation, and the deformer is super fast.

Thanks for making yourself available.

Ryan

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[Amaan Akram]

Hi Ryan,

I've started updating the docs on the bitbucket site

https://bitbucket.org/amaanakram/aaocean/wiki/browse/

They are not complete by any means, but hope it helps.

amaan

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