Hey everybody and thanks for having me here.
I am trough giving it a first go and here are my first impressions (before i learn the workarounds and forget them 
)
General:
- I like the way this is going by leveraging using Max’s modifier approach. Too many tools ignore it and and go for proprietary blackboxes. Thumbs up!
- The automatic “guidance” of the user that i came to love with krakatoa is there. Keep it up! (Like creating a Mesh, beeing asked for the camera and BermudaNode creation etc)
Wishes
- Easy Foam Generation. I saw the other post, will take a read there and add my thoughts there
- Object Interaction (For both foam generation and wake generation. See Tessendorf’s course notes for example (i assume bermuda is based on Tessendorf ?) for nicely reducing wakes to be a 2D problem tessendorf.org/papers_files/vert … riwave.pdf)
- One thing that always bugged me with Dreamscape’s ocean is that the Meshgeneration is based on the flat surface (leading to quite a lot of padding to be added to close all edge-holes).
I know that due to the fact that mesh generation and the wave generation are seperated this is a tough one. Just thought i’d throw it in the loop.
- Speed. Generation of the surface feels kinda slow (as with all competitors too, but still!) Exporting the maps is a good start. Is GPU acceleration maybe an option ? Also would be nice to have a way to store
a cache of the displacement with the scene instead of external files and beeing able to use both in a “read mode” in the scene (or does that work with the maps already ?). My main problem here is that i depending on the resolution the surface changes a LOT, so you kind of have to work near production res to judge what you are seeing.
More to come and again kudos for getting this going!
Regards,
Thorsten
Just to address a few of the wishes here. By the end of the beta we hope to have two more features: mental ray support, and basic foam mask creation.
-Foam: The foam will be masks similar to those created by dreamscape. You will be able to pre-cache a sequence of foam data that can be applied as a mask with a special shader to the ocean surface.
-Object Interaction: Yup, our ocean is based off of Tessendorf’s deep-ocean wave equations. Providing object interaction is a different ball game as you know, but it is currently on the wish list for future development once Bermuda is released. In the past we’ve worked a lot with fluid simulation. I have proposed to create a height-field based fluid simulator that could be packaged with Bermuda (if there enough interest in doing so), but this is not going to be part of the beta.
-Mesh padding: You are right in that this one is tricky, since I have no idea what the waves are going to look like at mesh generation time, and thus can’t really pad the mesh accordingly. What we’ve done for now is to provide two different padding options: World-space padding (simply some distance added to the mesh in all directions), and Field-of-view padding (where i enlarge the field of view by some percentage). Hopefully using a combination of these options will be sufficient in generating a mesh covering the entire screen after displacement.
-Speed: This one has been discussed in another thread too (the “Viewport / Rendering parameters” thread). Bermuda can be sped up a lot I believe. I need to multi-thread a few sections and profile the code to find bottlenecks. I have not look at all at GPU acceleration at this point, but that may be an option. Currently I’m working on getting the feature list down for the beta then I plan on some major optimizations.