Baking Ocean Sim textures

Has anyone tried baking textures from Ocean Sim using Selected-to-Active method, instead of built-in Ocean sim texture baking method ?

I recall doing it once. Works pretty much as you’d expect. The sim itself is different at different resolution settings though, so it’s useless in generated mode. If you have it in displace mode with a subsurf modifier above it though, you can bake a version with say, subsurf 5 against one with subsurf 2. Which works fine. No animation though.

Hmm… I need animated maps (a sequence), looped, tileable. Resolution of textures either 1024^2 or 2048^2. TGA file format.

How would I do that?

Why not use the built-in baker? Ocean res=32 will generate a 1k map. (it’s not the like sim has any more data to use in a larger map. You shouldn’t necessarily need 1px sized waves anyhow). You can use the compositor (or one of many others tools) to convert the .exr sequence to TGA. Not sure the ocean sim loops natively. You might need to keyframe the time value into a loop.

EDIT: While keying ocean-time in a loop should create a perfectly looped wave movement, it might not be the most natural looking thing since the wave stop and go backwards at some point.

Well, my CPU isn’t all that great, so messing around with settings in high resolution for the Ocean is super slow. And using lower res to tune setting, then bumping up resolution, produces entirely different results.

I also was never able to figure out EXR > TGA conversion, since I use Blender mostly for modeling/animation.

Well, it’s not like using the sim in displace mode at low res and baking a 1k map actually gets you any more data than that 256x256 or so texture the bake spits out. I know where you’re coming from on this, since I tried selected-to-active on the ocean sim for the same reasons. But it doesn’t actually work that way, the sim doesn’t HAVE any more detail than what is in that 256 map. You get a higher-res texture from selected-to-active, sure, but you’re scaling the same sim output across the same surface either way. You’re just changing where you do the stretching and scaling.

Converting is actually silly-easy. You just enable the compositor, import the image sequence with the “image” node, hook it up to the output, set your render format to TGA, and hit “render animation”.