Ok I'm back, and this time I've got more spangly wibbly bits than you can shake a stick at! "Hoorah!", you shout "what are you gonna teach us this time uncle chuggnut". Well I'll tell you, and don't call me uncle, I feel old enough without that.
Wooly jackets, the smell of the ole salty dog, sheepshanks, leathery skin and pipes. Any of these thing ringing a bell? Alright then I'd better tell you. The sea. Ah, now it's all clear. This should help alll you lost souls who need to do some funky water type effects.

This here is a quick real video clip of the finished fandango....

And if you can't be arsed to wait for that then heres a quick pic...

And god (or whoever) said let there be a circle.....

Lets start off nice and simple. A spline, or to be more exact a circle. Drag out a large circle. This is going to serve as the extents of your ocean, so make sure it's big enough for what you need. Then slap an extrude modifier on it. Extrude it some, how much deosn't matter, just make sure that the cap settings are set to grid. Thats the important bit.

You should have something like this, in fact you WILL have EXACTLY this, it's a little early in the tut to be getting lost yet!
This is a two sided shape, and while I have nothing against two sided shapes, we only need one side for this tut so, slap on a edit mesh and chop off the sides and the bottom. Good. Now we have a general base to shape the waves on. Even though there are quite a few polys in the shape we're gonna need more if we want any sort of detail in our waves. What we need to do is to beef up (beefcake, BEEFCAKE!) the area of the mesh that we're gonna be looking at. This way we don't spend polys where we don't need em'.

I'm taking a ride with my best friend....

We could select some of the faces by hand, but if we needed to pan the camera around a bit, then this wouldn't be very efficient would it? ("No uncle chuggnut")So the best way is to use the volume select modifier. So go put it on. It selects parts of the mesh thsat are contained within the gizmo, and it's animateable so you can dynamically change which faces are selected. Set it to select faces and choose the cylinder selection method. Now because we're working with a flat shape you may find that when you scale down the gizmo, that it stops selecting anything. If you do a 2D scale in X/Y from the top this should get round it.

Now we have a small patch of faces selected.
TIP:I forced the visability of all the edges in the mesh before using volume select, that way you can see what it's doing.
To beefup (BEEFCAKE!) the selected area bung on the tesselate modifier and give it 2 or 3 iterations. You should now have this....

A dense area of mesh in the middle of the circle. Now we need some waves, you can't have an ocean without waves can ya? Well maybe you can but I wanted waves and as this is MY tut I'm gonna have waves or I'll sulk!

Ijust can't get enough, I just can't get enough....

Ok so I'm gonna use some space warps, sure I could have slapped on a wave modifier, but all seemed too much like hard work and thinking to me. So spacewarps it is. Now I'm going to put three waves on this puppy, one very LARGE wave, we'll call this the swell wave. It's job is to generate a general heave to the whole thing, like a giant shifting tidal kinda' movement. Then I'm using two smaller waves that are nearly the same but just a little different and I'm going to rotate them so they lie at an opposing angle to the swell wave. You can place them wherever you want, but this configuration seemed to work quite well. Be sure to animate the phase of the warps so that they appear to move along. I used a very small amount of phase. Over 500 frames I animated the phase up to a maximum of 3. In hindsight this was a little slow overall. But I can live with it. The swell wave should have a small phase value or the sea will look a bit to lively and this will not help set the scale of the ocean. Slow moving things look BIGGER.

This is a pic of the warps in place. See how big the swell wave is. Cor blimey!

Remember to bind all the warps to the water mesh - use the button. Because only the tesselated bit of the mesh is selected, the outer areas of mesh don't get affected by the waves. This is good if you want to keep the horizon line still, further helping to set the scale of the ocean. But if you want to see the edge waving, like in a pool, then slap a mesh select on after the tesselate and this should fix the problem.

All I ever wanted, all I ever needed is here in my arms....

So now we've got the basic watery mesh sitting there waving and being all watery. But it doesn't look much like water does it? What it needs is some cunning texture that will magicaly transform it in to a yawning stretch of the Atlantic (or where ever).
So what are the properties of water? And don't say it's wet. Well, it's transparent, it's reflective and it distorts stuff when you look through it. Aha! it just so happens that I can simulate all of those properties with my trusry materials editor. Onward to the batmobile (TM).
Bring up the materials editor and call a new slot "water" (or something equally original). Set the transparency (opacity) setting to 20%. It's not necessary to set it to 0% because water is not completely transparent, just nearly. Next set the diffuse and ambient colours to dark blue and VERY dark blue. Mostly you won't see these colours, but it's important that you set them, also set the specular colour to white. Water is also kinda shiney, so we need to set the shineness appropriately. Make the shiny graph show a tall peak ala this diagram.....

Copy the rest of the settings from the piccy. But don't set the supersample just yet.

Now the wave spacewarps we created will cater for the gross movement of the water. But water on the whole has a lot more surface texture that just these large waves. What we could do with here is cunning use of bump mapping. For those of you who don't know bump mapping is a kinda fudge to give the illusion of surface texture without having to model it. You don't actually get a lumpy surface, it just messes with the way it calculates highlights to make you think that there is texture. The classic way of creating water is to use a noise bump map. Not one to fly in the face of such hallowed tradition, that's what wer're going to do. But in a funky dual level kinda way. What we need is a large heavily detailed bump with a smaller, subtler bump at a lower level. For this I'm using the mix map. So click on the bump slot and choose mix from the list. A mix map blends two maps together. Goto the first slot in the mix map and choose noise. Name this map "Big noise". Make the size of the noise about 25. Then goto the second slot in the mix map and choose noise again call it "small noise". This time put the size down to 1 and push the lower threshold up to about 0.4. What this does is to change the falloff from black to white in the noise. It means we get more black with sharp white noise peaks on our map. Go back to the mix map and set the amount of blend between the two noises. 0 means you get all "big noise" and 1 means you get all "small noise". I used a value of about 0.1, lots of "big noise" with just a hint of "small noise"

Let me see you stripped down to the bone...

Just two more things to set in this material of joy. The reflective bit and the bit that makes it go all wibbly. Lets deal with the reflective bit first. Now, in reality (pah who needs it!) the reflectivity of water changes on the angle that you view it from. If you see it directly from above then it's not very relective at all, but if you view it from a really low anlge, then then relfectivity increases. Now I could write an expression to alter the amount of reflection in the material based on the angle of the camera to the water. But I just can't be bothered. It all seem too much like hard work, so I'm gonna set it up for a kind of all purpose look. What we need to do is set the reflectivity so that you can still see the blue colour comming through clearly. (but the look of the thing is up to you) I set it to about 20%. I was going to use a bitmap in the reflection, but I opted to go for the generated reflection because is gives slightly more detail. What you do need to do is to give it something to reflect. We need to set up an environment. To do this pick an empty slot in the material editor and click the get material button . From the list pick bitmap and choose a nice cloud piccy for the reflection be sure to set the mapping type to environment and spherical. I tiled mine a bit to make it look more complex that it really was. Next goto the environment setting under the render menu. Click on the background slot and set the dialogue box to show what in the material editor. Then choose your cloud texture. This should mean that the water will reflect the clouds up above. Next we need to set the wibbly bit. This is called refraction (but you already knew that didn't you?) There are three different types of refraction (in max 2.5 anyway) ...

A.refelect/refract
B.thinwall refraction
C.raytraced.

Believe me I tried all of the multiple times. But in this situation thinwall seemed top work the best. Which is also good because there is very little to set up on it. I just changed the bump effect to around 3 so that It would take more notice of the bump map I put on. Set the refraction level to around 50%. The IOR (index of refraction) was set to 1.8. Yes I know thats not the IOR of water, but it just looked good.

And your worlds they fall apart, and the walls come tumbling in....

It would be good if there was something to refract though eh? I put this rusty metal pole in. But whatever you feel. We also need to fix the background. I used two cylinders, with the tops and bottoms cut off and flipped inside out. I put one above the water for the sky, which I mapped with some clouds. The other, I put below the water as the sea bed. I mapped it with a gradient, from dark blue at the top the a more deeply saturated blue at the bottom. This seemed to work just fine.

Then I put a camera in, this is the view from the camera....

And thats about your lot. I put a bit of image motion blur on the water - just the standard settings. Then I rendered it out through the video post, using a bit of lensFX focus (which 9 times out of ten is crap, but I managed to get away with it today). And there you have it. I think If I did it again I would probably speed the waves up a bit, bat as for the rest I think it worked out knida well. Till next time, Ta la.

Ten extra points for anyone who can tell me the name of the band whos lyrics the headings come from - it's dead easy!!