Hi, Okay, I'm working on my terrain elements for my bionicle scene and I am getting closer to what I want. I set up a cliff with a flat plateau and rocky sides that tumble down to the sea. The sea in this case is an infinite plane. Problem is, it's not so infinite. It ends just like it would if it were a regular plane...any ideas why it's doing this? I've got a realistic sky set up, the ground/horizon is set at 0 inches. But my "ocean" ends well before reaching the horizon...you can see the "edge" . I double -checked to make sure that I had in fact chosen infinite plane, and not just a regular one. Cheers, H&B

I did a quick render to illustrate my problem. It's a little dark on the edges where the plane is, because I was experimenting with a night time set-up. But that dark edge on the left is the edge of my alledged infinite plane. H&B

H&B, In the realistic sky did you uncheck the Ground plane, it looks like your terrain is going below the Ground plane and your infinite plane is probably covered by the ground plane too. Your terrain is looking alot better than the previous ones you posted . Good job. Mike

Thanks Mike, I unchecked the ground plane. Didnt really work. But I think I did figure out the problem. The water shader I was using had a transparency value in it, so that demarcation was the edge of my terrain showing up underneath the plane. Howeverm even knowing that, I still can't get a decent looking expanse of water. Which brings me to a more general question: how do you make a decent looking ocean? I want to be able to set up a shot of the rocky cliff falling into the sea, and see the ocean stretch to the horizon. Any suggestions? Mike? Anyone? Bueler? Bueler? Cheers H&B

Try using a low value for transparency(15%) and maybe a 25% for reflection and add a little noise in the bump channel , also a dark green/blue in the color channel . Mike

Thanks Mike, I'll give that a try. Cheers, H&B

H&B,

If you want a realistic turbulent water or seascape, use a terrain as your water surface rather than a plane. You can build the wave effects directly into the terrain surface using either using the noise options or modeling them directly. Then apply you water texture to this.

Good luck and I look forward to seeing the result.

Or you can use an infinite plane with Anything Grooves, if you have that... Or a different technique using planes with Anything Grooves, and an infinite plane with the same noise function for bump as the planes use for their height maps... It requires that the edges of the ordinary planes are slowly faded out to have no height, and a bump map or alpha channel working in the opposite direction, if you get what I mean... It's hard to get this technique to work properly though, mostly due to reflections acting differently as there is an actual height distortion on one, while the other only has different normals.