Hi collective Maya brain!
I've created an ocean shader using an animated displacement map and the Arnold standard surface shader with the Deep Water preset. On some frames I get this weird clipping on some of the waves. I'm stumped as to how to fix it, and it's a big problem for my animation.
At first I thought it was the displacement map being clipped, but changing the Bounds Padding makes no difference.
Increasing the Scale in the Displacement Attributes does make the artifact larger though.
I've concluded that it's related to the specular attribute, due to these observations:
If I move the camera and look at the same spot from a different angle, the artifact is gone.
If I give the plane a Lambert shader with the same displacement map, the artifact is gone. Similarly, if I keep the original ocean shader but turn the Specular Weight to 0, the artifact is gone.
Below are some renders with different settings.
Does anyone have an idea of what's going on and how to fix it?
I'm using Maya 2018. I do have an option to upgrade to a later version, which I guess could possibly help, but with a deadline on the animation in a few weeks, I'm worried that upgrading the project will cause other unforeseen issues that I won't have time to fix 😕
The artifact with the original ocean shader
Lambert shader (no artifact)
Ocean shader without displacement map (no artifact)
Original ocean shader with displacement scale x2 (larger artifact)
Any help would be greatly appreciated 🙂
