BUILD A TRANQUIL OCEAN SETTING

Paul Hatton dives into the process for making a beautiful beach with the ocean centre stage

- Paul Hatton

Creating ocean and beach scenes can be one of the toughest jobs around. There are just so many different components at work including displaced surfaces, numerous textures, foam requirements and vegetation, then there’s the not so small task of trying to get everything lit correctly.

This all contributes to a pretty daunting challenge. And if you start trying to visualise below the water’s surface then the challenge becomes infinitely harder.

Over the years I’ve worked on a number of different types of oceans with various software and renderers. I’ve found Chaos Phoenix one of the best options for generating realistic water surfaces, but we don’t have that plugin for Blender. A plugin is nice to have but not essential.

In essence, all oceans boil down to a displaced surface. The way that surface is displaced can take on various forms including geometry displacement or material displacement. The waves and how they move and respond to their surroundings is another factor that the natural eye already understands. It’s therefore not easy to trick the viewer and needs an accurate simulation in order to be genuinely believable.

In this tutorial we’re going to use the built-in Blender Ocean modifier, which is set up with a range of parameters perfectly suited for creating oceans. It’s by no means as comprehensive as Phoenix or other water simulators, but has enough in it to create pretty impressive results.