Parting Sea Tutorial

Mohawk is writing his tutorial for his Parting Sea scene here, or at least he says he is... :p

Creating a scene like the Parting Sea is not very hard to do, it just take time, and lots of it. What you need is a lake, and a painted shader. Set the water's height to the desired level, and start painting.

Remember to use enough brush falloff to have a gradient on the edges. That way you won't have hard edges later on.

What I did in my scene was paint straight along the x axis, so I could follow the line of the bounding box. It also helped when I added both height fields for the shores.

Once you have painted the line, create a displacement shader. Plug your painted shader into the displacement shader and plug that into the lake's plane object. Now open the settings of the displacement shader and set a negative value. If all went according to plan, the line you made should now have become a gully.

Adjust the displacement value until the bottom of the gully is just below the planets surface. You should have a slope from the ground to the vertical edge of the water, unless the water plane is very high and the displacement very strong.

Increase the wave size and roughness of the water to get less smooth walls.

To increase render times, add a surface layer with a green colour and a strongly warped fractal breakup shader to create a seaweed impression (also plug the fractal breakup shader into the surface layer's displacement input to add depth). Add another surface layer with a reflective shader as a child, so the seabed looks wet and muddy.

Place the camera at the right spot, et voilla, your very own parted sea.