Wavesets

[andylegate]

Has anyone gotten Wavesets to work yet? Especially those of you whom are porting your Blender Age to Max?

I keep getting an export error that say "PS water has no representation component"

I can still finish exporting, but when I link in.....there's no water....hrmmmmmmmmmm.

[TheMagician]

Water is something that hasn't been figured out completely yet.

However, you can have a look at THIS THREAD where Agenotfound explains how he sets his water up. He got waves working but has problems with the environment map.

[andylegate]

Oooooooo!

KK, I know what I'm missing now...I'll give it a try again...if it works out, I'll post my results....

[andylegate]

Okay, great, got what was wrong, not exporting with any errors now. It was the Render>Representation part......

I used Zephyr Coves settings for the waveset, and here's what I got so far:



Still trying to make the water a bit more opaque, but the ripples are starting to come out great. I'll be doing a tutorial on this over at the GoMa as soon as I can on this.

Thanks for the help guys!

[TheMagician]

Looking very good so far
Unforunately I also don't know how to control the transparency and environment reflections.
Keep us updated when you've finished the tutorial.

[andylegate]

Okay, I've gotten a good chunk of this figured out, and am going to be writing it up in a tutorial

However, there's still some problems: Passindex

We used that in Blender with the GoW Plugin, to set the order in which transparent objects are rendered. I can't find this in Max. I mean I know not to look for "Passindex" as Max uses terminology that's different from Blender, BUT, I'm having a devil of a time trying to find this. Here's why it's important, other than the obvious:

I've tried everything to get the waveset to darken and not be so transparent.....and failed. No mater how much I adjust things, I can get the water to be very calm with only a few ripples, and as violent as a hurrican swept sea! But it will only become just so opaque. Coloring it will not matter, as even black will only make the wave set a very light grey color.

So I went back, opened up Blender, and pulled up Er'canna, Ahononay Sphere 1, Teledahn and looked at the wave sets. They show quite clearly, 2 surfaces for water.
One that is high rez and is obviously the waveset, and one that is low poly.......and contains a water texture.

I remember asking about this way back when, and got told that the "low rez" or "low ploy" "Fake" surface was for people who's computers were not up to snuff to display wavesets, and this made sense back then.

But then I got a closer look at these things...and I walked over to the one mixing vat in Er'cana that gets full........the water we see there has the texture that is being used on the "low rez" or "fake" surface!

I went back to Max, created a new plane with a low amount of faces. I then moved it to just below where the surface of the waveset will be in game. I then textured it with the same water texture used in the vats in Er'cana, exported, Drizzled it, and then linked in, and TAH DAH! The water looked just like in Er'cana's vats, and not so clear.

The problem is, I need to use the texture's alpha channel so you can still see through the texture to the pool bottom, and when I do, yep, you guessed it, it disappears from view in game! Because I need to tell the waveset to render AFTER the fake surface.

Soooooooooo...........anyone have any idea what we use in Max for "Passindex" that we use in Blender? Anyone yet?

(I'm having a LOT of fun btw figuring this stuff out........and Chogon gave us the Male/Female Emote Max files.......wonder if we could possibly get, oh say, the Gira Max File? Or Teledahn???? ehehehehehe, would be great to look at it in Max, and bet it would answer some questions, heheheh, but then I also wish I could have a new car without paying for it........heheheh)

[andylegate]

Oooops.......I lied....sorry about that.

Actually, my cat did it....I was making a sandwich, and he jumped up here and walked across my keyboard while I was in Max.......and changed some settings. Apparently Merekat the cat knows more about making Wavesets in Max than I do!

Here's my wave settings. Notice where I've circled in purple. He (the cat) changed the "Mute" settings on reflections. I had it at the default. He set it to 100:

Show Spoiler

I played around with it, and when I set it to 10, this is what the water looks like:

Show Spoiler

As you can see, the water is almost not visable as it's too transparent.

Now here's what it looks like with the Mute set to 100:

Show Spoiler

As you an see, it's a BIG difference. Looks like the water we see in Bevin.

[andylegate]

Okay, I posted my tutorial on how to make Wave Sets in Max over at the GoMa forum:

http://www.guildofmaintainers.org/Forum ... 154&t=1675

[TheMagician]

Great tutorial, andylegate! This saved me tons of trial and error - who would think of this pivot shifting process?

Now about this pass index and render order business ...
I'm not sure whether I understand the problem correctly. Have a look at this picture:


There is the purple waveset plane which I created following your tutorial.
Then I created a new plane and assigned it one of the Ahnonay water textures which I extracted from URU.
It has an inbuild alpha channel. I placed this plane below the surface of the water and it is still visible.
Is that what you are looking for?

[andylegate]

Yes, that's what I'm looking for.

When I put my texture plane in, with a water texture. It will show up fine, but opaque. You can not see the pool bottom, only that texture.

If I go to the Material Editor and make sure that the texture's alpha is being used, when I export and link in then......the texture is gone, only the waveset remains.

When we first started using wavesets in Blender, we were making our ripples and shore foam too. That's an additional plane mesh just above the waveset surface location.

You texture it with a texture that is transparent too.....If you did not set the "Passindex" right on it (the mesh that has your ripples or shore foam), it would make the waveset texture disappear just below it. So the waveset would appear to suddenly stop right at the edge of the ripples, shore foam, or disturbed water (like you use with waterfalls).

I've not tried to make any ripples or shore foam yet (been busy with footprints that the avatar makes when running through water), but I'm wondering if I'm going to have the same problem when I do.

What did you do to make sure your "water texture" didn't disappear?

Here's a link to one of my old tutorials on Shore Foam in Blender, it talks about what I'm talking about here.