River material

[mase]

Hey everyone,

I'm trying to recreate a river material like in attached photos and I just can't create that kind of texture with procedural maps (the river will also have to be animated so needs to be procedural). I've tried Noise, Smoke, ProSimplex maps as well as OceanTex and combining them together, it just doesn't look real enough. Has anyone have any experience with this kind of material?

[dj_buckley]

Post some examples of what you've managed to achieve.

It will never look 'real' though until you've modelled and textured the environment including the river bed, embankments etc etc

[mase]

I'm aware of the river bed and everything that goes under the water but for me the challenge is water displacement. River water is quite irregular, needs to have a slight hint of stream direction, have different size ripples and have this "turbulent" look where it looks like it's going faster in the middle and slower to the sides (that could probably be done with distance map but I'm not quite there yet).

[Juraj]

I am suprised there isn't some kind of OSL shader that would created procedural noise with vector direction turbulences.
The vectors could be controlled by splines (like Motion Blur post-process) or from some occlusion precomp map.

Right now it's just simulation (very resource and time heavy) and non-vectorized procedurals. Or any trick combination that is situational.

I feel your pain ;- ). I am glad I don't have to do river animations because I would have meltdown.

[maru]

You get a Phoenix license with Corona Premium, just saying. :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Lqhz8aAwuY

If you don't want to simulate the whole river, you can also try with the Ocean Texmap (it works with Corona):
https://docs.chaos.com/display/PHX4MAX/Ocean+Texture+%7C+PhoenixFDOceanTex

[mase]

I am glad I don't have to do river animations because I would have meltdown.

That's exactly the issue here - seems like the only way to get realistic river results is to simulate river. However, the kind of river I'm trying to replicate here is a slow and calm river so in order to get this from a sim I feel like I would have to let the simulation run for days until it fills up the river bed and finally stabilizes into a calmly running water. Simply not viable given the scale of the project.

And I'm also very surprised such issue hasn't been raised by many before - we have tools for pretty much any kind of water look except for such rivers.

[mase]

You get a Phoenix license with Corona Premium, just saying. :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Lqhz8aAwuY

If you don't want to simulate the whole river, you can also try with the Ocean Texmap (it works with Corona):
https://docs.chaos.com/display/PHX4MAX/Ocean+Texture+%7C+PhoenixFDOceanTex

I've tried OceanTex and I just couldn't get any satisfactory results with it, no matter how much I played with the settings and the mapping. And as mentioned previously, simulating such river would most likely take days to compute and is simply not a viable solution for such project.

[Aram Avetisyan]

If things get complicated, remember to take a step back and start thinking simpler.

It is not 100% realistic, but you can get great results with turbulence and noise maps (add fractal if you want) and by animating their phase. Create multiple of them with different scales if you want more detail. If you are not rendering/looking from a point close to water surface, go with Bump only, as it will significantly improve render times.
Plus you can quickly see the results, in contrast to simulating something, then rendering and then checking the results.

See a very simply and quick scene I made using only turbulence noise.

[mferster]

I found these, maybe it would help with what you are looking for.

https://henrikbc.gumroad.com/l/figment_water_vol_1?layout=profile