Hello blender artists. I was wondering if anyone new of a photo realistic texture for a ocean mesh. I have made a ocean texture already it just doesn’t look photo real. If anyone knows a way to make a real looking ocean/water texture please post.
Thanks
In blender Internal Black with almost 100% reflectivity creates this:
A lot of the look is sky.
What place57 said, a certain amount of fresnel and transparency would probably get you quite convincing results.
Wow. That looks very good. Thanks I will try this. What do you mean by a lot of the look is sky? Do you mean the background image. Thanks for a quick reply.
in blender internal the reflectivity is acessed trough the mirror value.
Set that to 0.5 and play around ith the fresnel and blend valuesvalues
I found dark blue worked better for me than black, but that depends on sky etc.
for the sky make a dome or a cylinder that covers the scene. (check blendercookies ocean tutorial Skybox, oceansim settings and compositor tricks can be used for your blender internal scene, even though this is cycles in the tutorial)
Yes, the sky background is very portant because it fills the reflection with colours.
btw in this case its called shader, not texture
Thanks guys. I’m making a test scene right now. I will post a image when it gets gone.
Ok. I’ve worked on it and this is what I’ve come up with. What do you think?
ANY feed back good or bad is welcomed.
One thing to add on my above statement. Blendfile: So your saying that I should put a sphere/dome around my scene? Would that make the sky not appear? What is this supposed to do?
Thanks
All that is being reflected in your image is blue. This makes for rather boring reflections. And yes, put a sphere or a dome around the scene, uv a sky image to it, I prefer to make it shadeless, then re-render.
Thanks. I got the image on there sphere and the reflections in the water looking good but the mapping of the sphere is not on right. I changed the mapping to sphere already. How should I go about uv mapping it?
make a sphere, delete half the vertices.
delete the top vertex and ect the ring around the top
extrude in and scale it into a very small hole.
(you can later fix this, but this makes unwrapping a lot easier)
make a seam that goes down the sphere (ctrl e)
ect all and unwrap it with u, sphere projection (not sure but i think you should be in orthographic front view before this.
in the viewports toolshelf on the left check clip to bounds and scale t.b.
dont forget the material to use UV and youre done 
I recommend shadeless material for the skybox
also disable shadow receive and other options in the shadow options
OK. I did what you guys have said and have come away with what I think are some pretty good results. I made the wave smaller and changed the camera position. What do you think of it?
I want it look as good as possible so if you see something you think is wrong I will try to fix it.
Now you have to add the foam
I have tried to add the foam. And when I check to make sure it is there (using texture solid) but When I render it I can’t see it. I made a texture and it looks good but it wont show in the finale image. I will try to take some snap shots and post so you can see my set up.
Foam is pretty easy to make:
on the ocean modifier check the “generate foam” check box
Add a new texture to your ocean material
change the type of material to “Ocean”
in the “Ocean section” of the texture properties select the plane you used and in the drop down select Foam
Then render…
I have already done this. Look and see what I’m doing wrong.
look like you havent given your foam map any alpha influence. it should basically be a see through texture with white foam on it… play with settings till it looks right in the material preview box…
also on a seperate note… deep oceans often look good with a hint of dark blueish-green… sounds counter-intuitive but deep sea is rarely “blue”
