Rendering with mental ray and 3ds Max, 2nd Edition

6.2 Materials and shaders effects

In Chapter 5 you learned how mental ray interacts with some of the general shaders—for example, the Ocean (lume) shader that generates water surfaces. In this section you’ll learn about enhancing the look of the ocean’s surface to add a wake to a moving boat using displacement mapping.

However, the boat wake is not simply created using displacement mapping alone. Displacement mapping is used to disturb the surface of the water based on brightness levels in the map. White pixels in the map will create new geometry that is raised above the existing surface. Gray pixels in the map will be displaced somewhat less, depending on their brightness, whereas black pixels will do nothing.

Except in very slow-moving boats ...