Transparent water work arround

[rcallicotte]

Volker, thanks!  Again you surprise me with your understanding.  It's like you wrote this program.  Are you sure aren't really one of the programmers and are "chumming it" with the users to look humble?  LOL.

Cool use of this program...like moodflow said.

[Volker Harun]

I am just lucky that some minority of my mistakes turn out to be useful. That is all ,-)

[Volker Harun]

@Moodflow:
I added a colouring surface shader to the water-shader's input.

The colour function got a nice smooth fractal, the fractal breakup was connected with the Multiply Scalar on the bottom of my function (inverted shader).

Coverage 0.75; Fractal Breakup 0.75 look nice for darkening deep sea.

Volker

[ratsnake]

Fantastic walkthroughs! Very glad to see the solution!

[bigben]

Very nice.  I'd also suggest adding a shader based on a vector from the surface to the camera so that  you have more reflection as the angle becomes parallel with the water surface.

[Volker Harun]

@Bigben ... this works automatic due to the specularity of the default shader.

[zionner]

Nice work around Volker, How would you use this if you had Objects in the render?

[Volker Harun]

If you have an object above or floating in the water, it will probably intersect with the above function.

I would have to give it a try ... I think, that you would need two renders for imagemaps (under water-render, transparency-mask (which is calculated on the fly in the above function)) and the final render with water.

This is getting quite complex but ,-)

[zionner]

Right, I see what your getting at, but if I need the extra imagemap..Where do you think it would go?....would Creating another Default Shader, and connect that to the Colour function of the new Default..Then Merge?

[Volker Harun]

If you disconnect the default shader from the 'Waterbase'-node, you can see the simple mask (you might need to activate the colour in 'WaterBase' and change it to white).
Turn off the reflections of the water shader (but keep it for the waves' displacement).

This rendered image is the fractal breakup (imagemap with camera projection) instead of the function for the final render.

Does this help?

[zionner]

Yeah I get it now, Thanks

[Seth]

just to say that if you connect your "water shader" to the input node of a "merge shader" and a surface layer to the "shader A" of this merge, then you connect the "image map shader" to the colour fonction, you can play with transparancy by going to : "Merge Shader"/"Mix control" tab/Mix to A... to the left = less transparent, to the right more transparent...
perhaps yo already knew that...  

[Volker Harun]

Good point and a helpful addition. I haven't thought about this possibility.
Thanks for sharing!

[sonshine777]

I have been using the merge method for some time. The nice thing about it is you don't have to disable the reflection part of the water shader.

I am still working on perfecting it as is everyone else. Here is the post where I explained how I do it. Hope this will help others along in their quest for transparent water. (Until we get it for real)

http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=1391.0

[Volker Harun]

Good work ... I definitly missed that one. I just updated the 'Volker's Attic'-Thread for giving you the credits.