In this tutorial you’ll learn how to create a realistic animated ocean surface in 3d Studio Max using the Houdini Ocean modifier, part of the free Houdini Ocean Toolkit (Hot4Max). Creating realistic waves and other water surfaces can be extremely difficult to achieve in 3D, but with the integration of this fantastic plugin, you’ll be rendering out realistic sea in 3ds Max scenes in no time!

Installation

• Download and Install the Visual C++ Redistributable for Visual Studio 2012
• Copy libfftw3f-3.dll to your 3ds Max root directory
• Copy hotOcean_Max_20XX.dlm to your 3dsmax\plugins directory

Usage

Apply the Houdini_Ocean modifier to any mesh object. For best result use a plane object with over 100 height and width segments.