A contact map would be great. I haven’t found anything similar yet for max, and it would be simply perfect for water/objects interactions.
Just a map with a falloff where the object and the surface intersect. I used to render a top view of the object intersecting the water, water with black self illum, object with white self illum, but is not optimal - you got to tweak the object, and it’s a mess if the object shape occludes the zone that is in contact with the water etc etc.
The map should be calculated before rendering, so I could use it in volume select and/or displacement and/or in the shader as a mask for foam…
Just so I’m clear, you’d want just a texture map that masks off the region of contact between an object and the ocean surface?
If that is the case, we can kind of do that currently. It’s not really a good workflow, but you could set your modifiers up like this:
Base Object - Bermuda Mesh
1st modifier - Bermuda Modifier (contains ocean displacements)
2nd modifier - Volume Select (of your intersection object)
3rd modifier - Save vertex selection to map channel (this can be done with an empty Bermuda Modifier, and the “save vert selection” enabled)
Then the intersection map would just be a “Vertex Color” map in that case. It’s a little hacky, and you’d have to have a reasonably highly tessellated Bermuda mesh around the interaction.
I’m not really sure if I answered your question. How would you like something set up?
with a falloff/tolerance, yeah
This workflow would work, but unless stuff changed (we used max 2009 on planet dinosaur) volume selct based on object, on dense geometries, takes simply forever.
I did try and it simply wasn’t acceptable - it took forever. Rendering a map from top was way faster.
On the other end volume select is very very fast when it’s map based, so I used the rendered-from-top map as a vertex soft selection, on whom I could apply a ripple etc.
But a proper contact map would be the perfect solution. I really don’t know how hard would be to code tho’…
I think a Thinkbox Volume Select modifier based off the existing kd-tree code should be either part of Bermuda, or Krakatoa, or ship as a stand-alone extension. The Max Volume Select just does not cut it when using a mesh volume (it works for most other things). Just ask Darcy - when he got the Mesh Volume to work with Krakatoa, it broke everything else. We had to settle for supporting all modes except for Mesh volumes…
For the record VRay comes with VRayDistanceTex wich does pretty much that. Tho sadly atm this is relative to the surface not the volume from my tests. Wrote a Featurerequest for that one tho.
Regards,
Thorsten
I think the volume selection to UV is a perfectly valid method. Admittedly, the vol select modifer in max (man i miss it when in maya!) is pretty slow - but unless ytou are looking for technically perfect interaction/selection maps - simply using a lower resolution surface or even skinwrapping a proxy mesh to a contained/small area where the interaction is wanted and then rendering off the maps works fine. THe resulting map can be layered and mixed with procedurals and hand painted maps for the effect.
Interaction/foam mapping is somewhat an elusive ideal for wave/ocean sims - as an entirely automated approach/solution i doubt will ever look correct or convincing. Maps from height fields and mesh convexity/concavity are a good base - but it will always demand some work to make it usable.