Hello, I was wondering if any of the FX wizards here on the forums could assist me with an answer to a question I'm pondering:

Is it possible to use a Renderman shader for an infinite ocean that is displaced using Ocean Spectrum data?

I'm working on a student film at my school and we are using Renderman as our preferred renderer of choice, but I've been finding it very difficult trying to get the native Houdini ocean tools to work with Renderman shaders. Correct me if I'm wrong, but Houdini uses the spectrum data at render time and then displaces the ocean surface using the ocean shader when rendering in mantra. So that is not a route I could take using Renderman , right?

I'm just confused and I know there are a lot of brilliant minds out there in the community that can help me to know if I should sooner rather than later go tell my director that we should just render the ocean in mantra and comp it in during post.

RenderMan does not read the ocean spectrum data no. What you could try is using the aaOcean shader [rmanwiki.pixar.com] and bake out a part of the ocean displacement to a texture to use in sops if you want integrate it with a simulation etc.
Here is a quick mockup I did of using the ocean shader.

Don't think the chop is supposed to turn white but I thought it looked “cool”

edit: so it looks like this shader is sampling a ocean spectrum so you might be able to edit the shader to read a Houdini ocean spectrum instead?
code [github.com] info [www.amaanakram.com]