Three guys in a boat

[sboerner]

Thanks, Hannes.

Btw a simple way to apply a roughness waterline in TG has been staring me right in the face. I'll try it later.

[masonspappy]

There is now water dripping from the oars....

There is now water dripping from the oars.

Hey, that's a really neat touch!

[Dune]

Great improvement. Very convincing now. Perhaps a bit too 'fatty' water drips, but that's nitpicking.

You could use the lambert shader as child of a no color surface shader after the default for translucency, but what for? You need the hull's color, don't you? How would you see the shader line then? I would probably try merging two shaders; default and reflective added by distribution in altitude. Or just add the reflective on surface shader with it's altitude restriction, and with smoothed, or even additional bump for more reflections.

Blenders' fluid sim; didn't think of that one, always thinking it would be way too complicated. I pulled mine out in ZBrush by hand (hardly visible in the guy on the stream edge in my recent post), but real fluids would be more interesting....

[sboerner]

This is the simplest of all, using a solution that should have occurred to me several days ago. Oh well.

Use a distribution shader (with use Y and final position) to set up the waterline. The breakup shader is important here so you don't get an even line. This becomes the mask for the reflective shader and, inverted, is piped to the roughness function of the default shader where it is combined with the roughness map (multiplied, I think).

This is the sort of step that's better done in Terragen than earlier in the pipeline, because so much depends on the context and lighting. It's more subtle than the previous version (where the roughness was applied in Mixer) but better imho.

Done with this for now.

Great improvement. Very convincing now. Perhaps a bit too 'fatty' water drips, but that's nitpicking.

Thanks, Ulco. About the fat drops, maybe? Some of the references I found show the oars shedding sheets of water, and the oar in the back is the animation frame where the sheet begins to break up into streams of drops. Anyway as I said this was mainly a test to see if it works. Blender's fluid simulation (like everything else with Blender these days) turned out to be much easier than I feared. Can't wait to play with it some more. Lots of possibilities.