Water water, everywhere

Started by kevnar, July 02, 2011, 06:01:45 AM

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kevnar

I'm working on a Carribean scene and I need to know how to make water clear and clean, with maybe a few sunbeams sparkling inside it. Not sure if this can be done. I poked around the forum archives a bit. I poked around the controls, randomly changing settings, but it doesn't seem to work. I've tried all different transparency levels, and various decay distances in the water shader but the water always seems to be kinda murky. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance.

Henry Blewer

Water seems easy. But there are a few things that can make it look wrong.
You'll have to make the transparency higher, about 0.825. The decay distance depends on how high above the seafloor you are at that location. Use the 3D preview location with the lake object turned off to find the depth. Set this subtracted from the lake altitude as the decay distance. This may need tweaking...
Because you want the transparent part to be quite deep, fade into a light sky blue the the volume 1 color. Keep the volume 1 density about 0.2.
Finally, increase the highlight intensity to 0.8 and the Min highlight spread to 0.09. The last thing is getting the sun angle correct. Keep the sun angle low to the horizon and about 15 degrees right or left of the cameras viewpoint. This will cause the highlights to really pop.
You can reduce the highlight intensity and min highlight spread to fit the scene better.
Wind patch effect settings and wave size also have a large effect, but these are very scene dependent.
I hope this helps.
http://flickr.com/photos/njeneb/
Forget Tuesday; It's just Monday spelled with a T

freelancah

#2
When you say sunbeams sparkling I guess you mean caustics? Maybe this will help?

Edit: apparently I forgot the link: http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=9998.msg104551#msg104551

dandelO

I was meant to post here last night but my laptop died as I was doing so.
All that's really 'wrong'(not even wrong) with the .tgd you've posted is that you should probably, as Njeneb says, raise transparency to nearer 1, 1 is good, and move your camera to a looking downwards, 'through' the water, instead of across it, where the reflection will cancel out the transparency visually.
Using only the decay distance and colour controls is the cheapest way to get a transparent and clear surface. Adding volume density and colour will only add render time for you here and is unneeded if you only want clear water. 'Volume' of water is a confusing idea as well, since there is no actual volumetric water in TG just now, but if you wanted to add shadows in the water-body, or make it cloudy/coloured/textured/patterned, etc. then that's where you'd find the best use of the volume controls, not for making it appear 'clear'. Well, that's what I think, anyway.

I've only changed the subsurface tab's decay distance/colour in the water shader and dropped the volume completely. Changed the pov to look downwards and I changed some atmosphere/cloud quality samples to use RTA for a cleaner result with less samples required. I'm a big fan of RTA when you can cheat it to render better looking and faster than the default renderer does.

* Seth came across a really cool way of making an ultra-clear and luminous effect in water by using just transparency values in excess of '1' some time back, too, try transparency values of 2, 3, 5 or 10, to start with. Not natural, but fun indeed, and sometimes quite impressive. ;)

Redwolf

that is a nice bit of water there martin, Will use those settings on my last post here