Research and Development: Ocean Test 01

The area of specialism that I wish to get into is based around effects. Hence I wanted to create the majority of the effects in our project. One of the key features of our animation was that it was set in the open sea. I was given the task of creating the appropriate ocean for two types of sea- one being a calm sea and one being stormy.

This was a great opportunity for me to experiment with this very complex and useful inbuilt tool of maya.

My first lesson was understanding that maya ocean, although located in the dynamics tab- is not really dynamics at all. It is a combination of an animated texture, coupled with displacement maps that are also animated to give the look of an ocean with waves etc.


Some of the initial renders look very bad but improve gradually.

Mayas' Default Ocean

Finding the appropriate wave/ocean size

At this stage I was still struggling to achieve the correct effect. This was partly due to the relative scene size (all modeled to scale).

Here you can see minor improvements in the sea, however it is quite obvious that there is serious issues with the visual.

This must urgently be corrected if we want to give the impression of an actual open sea shot.

I found that the most difficult aspect of testing maya ocean is that it contains such a wide variety of attributes that need to be altered. If I was to be successful in tweaking this ocean I would need to systematically make changes and simplify this multivariable problem.