I am looking for advice or best practices how to create large ocean surfaces using the new Ocean toolkit in Houdini.

I created a Grid, added an Ocean Wave deformer on top and created a nice wave pattern. Anyway, the patch I created is too small for a wide open ocean shot with a sailing boat running through…

Scaling up the basic grid seems like brute force and is probably not the best of ideas.

I could export the Diplacement and apply that to another surface, like many tiles of it…but then I will see a pattern which I do not want.

Creating three different kinds of those Waves (close, far, very far) was cool, but how do I get those planes together without gaps becoming visible?

Thank you for help and ideas in advance.

I've not used it myself, but if you've not been there already, it may be worth checking out the od|force forums, as they have an Ocean Toolkit area:

http://forums.odforce.net/index.php?/forum/57-houdini-ocean-toolkit/ [forums.odforce.net]

Don't forget that Houdini now also has it's own integrated Ocean tools.

Edit: Ah, I see you're already there ;-)

What I did was creating three square planes with different resolution for different ranges(close/mid/far). I applied a similar ocean pattern to each wave, but my problem are the transitions.

What can I do in order to mask the transitions or at least make them less obvious?

Hi There hope this helps.

I am using it on several shots for an upcoming feature movie.I made a 1km x 1km ocean , basically I seperated one giant grid in several zone. The way you will seperate yours, largely depends on your camera. So assuming you have one camera looking to the horizon you can use as many grids as you like lined up, to the horizon, and you will need to apply seperate deformers but with same settings, since the ocean deformer works in world space, if you keep the same settings, you wont get diffferent waves at the edges of the grids…

One issue I face thou is since my grids further to the camera has less faces they do not come back as same color in render , usually lighter since they have less faces therefore less self reflection etc, but since they are different patches you can render them seperately and match the colors after. One thing that seems to help to avoid pattern repetition over distance is, after I deformed my all patches I merge them and then I add big swell type deformer.. that seems to break up the pattern a bit..

one of my ocean shots is actually so big I have 10 patches so in total I have 23 deformers , with an interactive FLIP zone in the middle

Yes ,I used seperate render file technique in my personal project and this is OK !
I think fast and very simple way is render your ocean with LOD in seperate files (Near with high grid resolution , middle with normal grid resolution , far with low grid resolution )
and finaly composite them with gradient transition between each rendered footage in compositing software,Also to make same color and light you can color correct them seperatly :-)

Just curious to know if there are any other techniques that have come to light in the last year that are being used to accomplish the same thing.

It should be possible to create several different textures that can then be masked with a noise pattern as an alpha channel - allowing for a single wide ocean surface that doesn't appear tiled. But I can't seem to figure out how to do it in SHOPs.

The ocean will always repeat but with a large enough tile size coupled with strategic viewing angles or rotating the ocean patch or wave direction (so you're not looking straight along one axis that the waves are aligned to) it will be harder to see the repeats. It also helps if you have other objects closer to camera occluding parts of the ocean (i.e. a boat).

As others have said you can render separate oceans and blend them in 2D with a map on the same surface (3 separate renders). If you don't want to do separate renders or need a more accurate change in ocean types you can use the same maps and blend between separate displacement maps in the same shader. A little more work than in 2D but works pretty well if you're comfy hacking the shader a bit.

If you don't want to do separate renders or need a more accurate change in ocean types you can use the same maps and blend between separate displacement maps in the same shader. A little more work than in 2D but works pretty well if you're comfy hacking the shader a bit.

That's my goal; I remember reading about a similar technique in fxguide's article on Kon Tiki. But I've got to learn a lot more about SHOPS (or at least the ocean shader itself) before I have another go at it.