Working with the Houdini Ocean Toolkit in Maya

There are no shortage of water simulation tools in Maya. From ocean shaders to fluids, to the ultimate in water simulation, Bifrost. What about some alternatives though? Maybe an ocean toolkit that is easier to use?

There are a few other 3rd party water and ocean tools available. aaOcean is one of them. It is an ocean simulation system based on Tessendorf waves. aaOcean can be used in Softimage, Maya, Houdini, Mental Ray, and Arnold.

Three is also another —The Houdini Ocean Toolkit. It has been ported to other platforms such as Cinema 4D and also Maya. HOT is an implementation of Drew Whitehouses Houdini Ocean Toolkit.  3D Freelancer Nico Rehberg has ported the the toolkit code to Maya and Mental Ray / Arnold.

Michael Rew Small Robot Studio posts a short tutorial showing how you can use the toolkit as an alternative to all the other tools. Check out the HOT for Maya here, and have a look at another example, from Technical Director James Hall’s example which was rendered in V-Ray.