default transparency under water doesn't work

[Dune]

I've got another riddle for you...


By the way, you can simulate ice shelves and trapped air with an extra plane (with some surface layers) just underneath the lake, as long as you get the ground colors as the main input of the first surface layer. But if you drop a shark into the water, it won't be visible.

[Henry Blewer]

The shark is an imported object. The plane is an object generated directly by the program. I wonder if these get calculated differently?

[dandelO]

I was confused about exactly why unchecking 'vtor' was showing the plane with opacity patches, until I realised this;

I don't think opacity works at all underneath transparent surfaces. Even when 'visible to other rays' is unchecked, you only ever see opaque parts that are above water. I was seeing them to begin with because the waves of the water shader are higher at some parts of the ice object than others. Anything above the surface can be seen in the first clipfile, below it is completely omitted, apparently.

* Cheers, Neuspadrin.

As soon as any object with opacity values in its shader is placed under a transparent object, the opacity effect is completely lost and the subsurface object is rendered as solid again. Transparency appears to completely cancel out the opacity of a secondary object below it.
Although, on a single object, you can still make it have opaque patches and then make those patches transparent.
I confused things earlier by wrongly saying that unchecking 'vtor' appeared to fix the problem, when I got closer to the objects, I realised that only parts of it that were above the transparent surface were visible at all.
I thought I'd cleared that up in the above quote. Should have been clearer. Sorry, folks. :/

[Dune]

Right, so the only way to have underwater ice shelves is to throw loose objects in. Here's my result so far with the faked shelves... the transparent ice looks 'deep', but isn't. Any object under the ice or the lake bottom is invisible. Too bad.

[Hetzen]

This is where I got stuck Ulco.

[Henry Blewer]

The new clouds might be an option. They get cutoff now above and below parameter altitudes, flattening them. If the hardness and density was high enough, they could look solid.

[Dune]

Henry, that played in the back of my mind as well, but I think it'll be heavy on the computing, and hard to control. But as long as you don't have rocks or objects under water faking it is not too bad. Now I need to find a way to make the ice shelves that stick out nicer...