My lakes look like puddles and I'm not sure how to fix this issue...

Started by alexrabbitt, December 03, 2020, 08:28:49 AM

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alexrabbitt

Hi, I'm fairly new to Terragen, and I'm just experimenting with the water texture to replicate a scene.
I've imported my Terrain from Gaea, which I'm happy with for now but I can't seem to get my water texture to not look like a puddle...I'm really unsure of what I'm doing wrong, I've adjusted the sliders to what I thought they should be at but it doesn't seem to work, my Lake just seems to look like a puddle with very large waves and incredibly glossy.  I'm attempting to mimic water that looks like the final image I've attached.

Attached are some example images.

Thanks for the help!

Dune

Welcome here first of all.

If you want smaller waves you can easily adjust them, keeping in mind that sizes are in meters in Terragen. Bring the largest size (10m) down to 2 for instance. You can also adjust the amount of reflection. It's 1 at default, but people often decrease to 0.8, also to see more underwater. You can also play with the patchiness. The example seems pretty patchy.
Also, with hard clouds they will be reflected as such. If you want smoother reflections, you can either use different clouds, or use smooth reflections in a reflective shader (add after the water shader and set reflective to 0 in the water shader). Smooth reflection settings should not be much higher than 0.04, or you should increase samples (or blockiness may occur).
Using the Path Tracer will give you smoother wave reflections anyway, if the 'min highlight spread' in the water shader is kept at 0.01. The bigger that size the softer the reflection.

alexrabbitt

Fantastic thank you very much, I seem to have got the hang of it now.  Thank you!