Physical Open Waters
Cinematic & Procedural Open Waters
Build photorealistic seas and oceans with one click. Real time responsiveness in Eevee allows you to prototype stunning scenes in seconds.
Features
Ready to use presets. Save time with a list of carefully curated ocean presets that come with the addon, or build your own library.
Realtime speed and performance. Experience unparalleled speed and efficiency with real-time rendering, ensuring smooth performance during both editing and playback of your oceans.
Animate everything. Use keyframes to effortlessly animate each feature and bring your ocean to life.
Full creative freedom. User-friendly interface, allowing even beginners to create stunning oceans with ease. Adjust the settings, and watch your scene transform in real time.
User-friendly interface allowing even beginners to create stunning visuals with ease. Simply adjust the settings and watch your ocean transform.
Eevee & Cycles integrates seamlessly ensuring compatibility and consistent results across your favorite rendering platforms.
Capillary Waves simulates the physics of small-scale, surface-tension-driven waves on water bodies, adding intricate detail to fluid dynamics in aquatic scenes.
All our addons work together to create procedural worlds you won't be able to distinguish from reality.
Regular updates
Our team of developers are constantly improving our addons to expand capabilities and ensure support for the latest Blender releases. Release notes
Dedicated support
Our team and vibrant Discord community will help you with any difficulties alongside your journey. Join our Discord
- Presets. Access and manage a library of ocean presets. Save, or delete existing presets and create new ones for quick setup and customization.
- Mesh. Mesh Size: dictates the overall dimensions of the ocean simulation, allowing for scaling the water body to suit the scene's size requirements. Mesh Resolution: controls the granularity of the water surface, enhancing the realism of waves and ripples, essential for achieving both broad ocean vistas and detailed close-up views.
- Material. Customize the ocean's material properties, including color and subsurface scattering to achieve the desired look.
- Camera & LOD. Configure camera settings and Level of Detail (LOD) for optimal rendering at various distances, ensuring high performance without sacrificing visual quality.
- Waves. Fine-tune the wave patterns, adjust their amplitude and frequency to simulate everything from calm seas to turbulent storms.
- Capillary Waves. This feature allows for the simulation of small surface waves caused by surface tension, providing an additional layer of realism to close-up scenes.
- Wakes. Simulate the trails and disturbances left by objects moving through the water, adding dynamism and interaction to the scene.
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Underwater. Underwater shader: Blend in submerged objects with applying underwater shader. Particles: Add particles to simulate the fine details of underwater environments. Underwater Volumetrics: Utilize Blender's volumetric capabilities to create stunning underwater atmospheres with depth-based light scattering and absorption effects.
Pricing
Creator notes
- The complexity of the open waters
- Shader Implementation
The complexity of the open waters
Simulating open waters in 3D environments, especially in real-time, is a complex task due to the multifaceted nature of water as a material and the dynamic conditions under which it exists. The challenges in simulating water include recreating the visual properties, such as reflection and refraction, as well as the physical behavior, like wave dynamics and interactions with objects and the environment.
Reflection and Refraction
Water surfaces reflect the environment and refract light passing through them. Shaders must account for the Fresnel effect, which changes the reflectivity based on the viewing angle. Real-time cube mapping or screen-space techniques can be used for reflections, while refraction often requires a distortion effect based on a normal map.
Wave Dynamics
Realistic water movement can be achieved through a combination of techniques. The Gerstner wave model is commonly used to simulate wave displacement. This model allows for the creation of waves that combine different amplitudes, wavelengths, and directions, creating a convincing, moving water surface.
Shader Implementation
Vertex Shader
For altering the vertices of a water mesh to simulate wave movement, using the Gerstner equation to displace vertices.
Fragment Shader
For computing lighting, reflection, refraction, and shading details. This involves using normal mapping for small ripples, specular mapping for shiny water effects, and possibly shadow mapping if the water receives or casts shadows.
Procedural Generation
Open waters in a large environment are often procedurally generated to avoid the memory cost of large textures. Noise functions like Perlin or Simplex noise can generate the base pattern for the water surface. These patterns can be tiled and offset over time to simulate continuous motion.
Performance
Real-time performance requires careful consideration of computational cost. Level of detail (LOD) systems can reduce the number of calculations by simplifying the water simulation at distances. Simpler mathematical models may be used for distant water, while closer water requires more detailed simulation.
Interactions
Simulating interactions with other objects, like boats or characters, adds another layer of complexity. This involves dynamic modification of the water's surface and appropriate response in the shader, which can be simulated with render targets that allow shaders to write and read interaction data.
Environmental Effects
Water appearance changes with weather conditions and time of day. Shaders must adapt to different lighting conditions, and possibly integrate with particle systems for effects like foam and splashes.
Optimization
Techniques such as culling, where non-visible water surfaces are not processed, and using lower precision arithmetic where possible, can help maintain performance. Additionally, shaders can be written to take advantage of the parallel processing capabilities of modern GPUs.
Each of these areas presents its own set of challenges and requires specific shader programming techniques to handle the data efficiently and produce convincing results. The actual implementation would vary greatly depending on the platform, performance considerations, and the level of realism required by the project.