Ocean Level % | oceanlevel – Used with the Ocean Mesh and Cap Mesh rendering modes. Specifies the water level as a percentage of the total grid height.
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Ocean Level is a rendering setting which is closely related to the Initial Fill Up simulation setting in the Dynamics rollout.
Both should initially be set to equal values, and the Ocean level should be adjusted after the simulation is done, if needed. This has to be done manually because the liquid surface might bounce up or down in the first few seconds until it settles.
Depending on a variety of factors, the resulting surface might be a little below or a little above the Initial fill up value, and this cannot be automatically predicted.
The Ocean level should remain constant and should not be animated for the duration of the render sequence, otherwise the horizon would start moving up and down.
Border Fade % |oceantransitionzone- The width of a zone inside the Simulator Grid where the mesh surface level would smoothly transition into the displaced waves outside the Simulator. The value is a % of the Simulator width. Increase the value if you need a smoother transition. This option can be especially useful for merging tall waves created by a Wave Force inside the Simulator, with tall displaced waves outside the Simulator.
Ocean Subdivs | meshsubdiv – Used with the Ocean Mesh and Cap Mesh rendering modes. When generating the far areas of the surface, this determines how many vertices will be generated for each pixel of the image. Like with V-Ray subdivisions, the square of the parameter value is used. For example, if you increase the subdivisions twice, the vertices count will grow four times. For more information, see the Ocean Subdivsexample below.
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Increasing the Ocean Subdivs may dramatically increase the amount of consumed RAM.
Horizon Roughness | oceanhorizrough – Controls the roughness of the distant ocean surface near the horizon. Adds more detail to the waves, which is especially helpful when using a highly reflective material for the ocean surface. Increasing this value can potentially produce visible noise when rendering an animation. To counter this effect, increase the Ocean Subdivs parameter.
Off-Screen Margin (%) | oceanextramargin – The ocean is generated only in the camera view, which can lead to problems when using camera motion blur, using reflections, using refractions with Underwater Goggles enabled, or when the ocean casts shadows on objects underwater. This option allows you to extend the ocean further from the borders of the camera view in order to solve such issues. The value is a percentage of the image size.
Pure Ocean | pureocean – Creates a flat ocean surface up to the Ocean Level height. It does not need loaded caches and if there are any, it ignores their content, so no simulation details will show. Thus changing frames and generating the ocean surface is very quick. This allows you to preview the behavior of the Phoenix FD Ocean Texture when Displacement is enabled or if you want to set up your texture for the Wave force. The option is available for both preview and rendering in Ocean Mesh or Cap Mesh modes. During preview, it requires the Show Meshoption to be enabled in the Preview rollout.
Underwater Goggles| uwglasses – This option is designed to be used when the camera is placed under the water in Ocean Mesh or Cap Mesh mode. When enabled, a surface gets automatically added in front of the camera, using the same material that is assigned to the Simulator, and this way mimics the effect of real life underwater goggles. This way the ocean volume receives the Fog color from the material assigned to the Simulator, and the field of view shrinks when the index of refraction of the material is above 1. For more information, see the Underwater Gogglesexample below.
oceanpriority – Script parameter with a default value of 0. This parameter can be used for controlling which is the primary ocean container when several ones are merged together. The Simulator with the highest priority will provide the material and the rendering settings (the Ocean Level, the Ocean Subdivs, etc.) for the merged ocean. The actual combined mesh is not affected by the ocean priority.
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Example:
Select a Simulator that you want to have more priority and in the MaxScript Listener type: $.oceanpriority = 3
The Simulator with the highest priority in the scene will be the one whose material and ocean settings will be used by the combined ocean mesh.
oceanforcerenddetail– Script parameter that allows to build the viewport Ocean with the rendering detail, otherwise a simplified version will be used for the viewport preview.
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Note that higher detail will impact the viewport performance.
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Notice how the field of view shrinks when the option is enabled, due to using Refraction IOR = 1.33 in the Simulator's VRayMtl.
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Smoothness | smoothmesh – Specifies the number of smoothing passes. The higher the value, the smoother the result, but the mesh will require more time to calculate. Used when Mode is set to Mesh,Ocean Mesh, or Cap Mesh to reduce the roughness of the mesh.
Smooth Normals |smooth_normals – Smooths the normals of the mesh in order to get an even smoother looking result, even if the mesh is with low resolution. However when the Ocean displacement is used to add fine details the smoothing of normals should not diminish that and can be turned off.
Always– The mesh normals will be smoothed always.
When displacement is off– The mesh normals will be smoothed only when the Ocean displacement is off.
Never– The mesh normals will not be smoothed.
Use Liquid Particles | useprt – Enables particle-based smoothing of the mesh. It requires Liquid particles to be simulated and exported to the cache files. This method overcomes the limitations of the basic smoothing without particles, which can flicker in animation and cause small formations in the mesh to shrink.
Particle Size | prtsz – Used to make the liquid thicker or thinner. Works only when Use Liquid Particles is enabled. This parameter specifies the distance from the mesh surface to the particle centers.
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To render your simulation with Motion Blur, you need to enable Velocity channel export from the Output rollout of your simulator.
When rendering liquids, the Motion blur of the mesh is obtained by shifting each vertex along the velocity by the shutter time. If rendering a Liquid simulation with secondary particle effects such as Foam, Splashes or Mist, you would also have to enable Velocity export for each particle system under the Output rollout → Output Particles section.
Multiplier | mbmult – Specifies a multiplier that affects the strength of the motion blur. This value can be a negative number.
Prevent Self Intersection | mbself – In all Mesh modes, some motion blurred vertices might penetrate the opposite side of the geometry. When enabled, this option prevents such situations. The self-intersection analysis is expensive, so enable this parameter only when an intersection is obvious.
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Phoenix meshes are motion blurred in a different way than regular transforming and deforming geometries. When rendering regular meshes with motion blur, the entire mesh is moved along its transformation path back and forward in time, and so each individual vertex of the mesh follows this path. However, for each rendered frame, a new Phoenix mesh must be built from the voxel grid, and so it usually has a different number of vertices than the previous and the next frame. Because of this, individual vertices can not be traced back or forward in time between frames. Instead, motion blur of fluid meshes uses the velocity of vertices which is recorded by the simulation, and moves each vertex back and forward in time along the vertex velocity. This is why the generated liquid mesh does not support frame sub-sampling for motion blur. This may cause a mismatch between the liquid and transforming/deforming objects in your scene that interact with it. The fluid mesh is generated from data at the exact rendered frame and fluid data for the preceding or following frames is not used, unlike regular deforming meshes. As a consequence, the liquid and the objects in your scene would synchronize best if those objects do not use additional geometry samples for motion blur.
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The Grid Channel Smoothing controls allow you to smooth the Grid Channels loaded from cache files for preview and rendering.
You can smooth the Velocity Grid Channel stored in the simulated caches in case the motion blurred edges are looking jagged.
The recommended values for the smoothest result are all zeroes for the Threshold, Similarity and Random Variation options - this will produce strongest smoothing, evenly applied over the entire Grid, without adding any random variation.
