A Simple Render + wet mud!

[dhavalmistry]

I bet that kills the render time 

Nice effect though, all at needs is some spray and rougher water to account for the damp (I agree looks more like moss), above the water line.

before I added the wet look......the render only took about 4 hrs and now that I added the water shader...it took like 7 hrs....although I did render the last one at slightly higher quality then the rest of them...

[Tangled-Universe]

Hey Dhaval, this looks really good!
However, I think there's a simpler and faster method:

Add default shaders as child layers to your surface layers and give them the same diffuse color.
Then go to the specularity settings and choose something like 0.15 specularity and 0.4 roughness, as a start.
These 2 settings give good control on the appearance of your wet look.
To my opinion the highlights are too strong. I think you can also adjust this in the watershader but the second advantage of using specularity instead of a watersurface is that it renders faster.

Martin

[dandelO]

I find the best way to create wet textures is to use the reflective shader but disable 'ray traced reflections'.
I'm actually using it in a scene right now that I've been kicking around for a couple of weeks, I'll post a little crop of the wet look rocks on my pond-bank shortly...

[dandelO]

Here's a quick 0.5 detail crop of an area of wet rocks using a reflective shader assigned as the child of a blank surface layer, with ray traced reflections disabled, it's pretty quick to render convincing water-sheen this way and the surface layer will serve as your distribution shader nicely.

[Tangled-Universe]

That's a nice looking crop, looking forward to see the final result

About the wet surface: there are some very small bright highlights which are brighter than the water and I think that looks unnatural.
You might try to lower the intensity or increase the reflectivity roughness to give it a more diffuse/softer appearance.

[dhavalmistry]

Hey Dhaval, this looks really good!
However, I think there's a simpler and faster method:

Add default shaders as child layers to your surface layers and give them the same diffuse color.
Then go to the specularity settings and choose something like 0.15 specularity and 0.4 roughness, as a start.
These 2 settings give good control on the appearance of your wet look.
To my opinion the highlights are too strong. I think you can also adjust this in the watershader but the second advantage of using specularity instead of a watersurface is that it renders faster.

Martin

yes believe me I have tried everything to get a descent wet look....best results I got were from water shader so I concentrated more on it...although I will give another try to default shader and try to follow your guide....


@dandelO - please do post the final....its looking really good!

[dandelO]

Cheers folks, I'll post it as soon as it's done...
Yup, TU, the surface is looking a little too shiny at the moment, it's at the close but no cigar stage for now. I don't like to hijack the thread but, the real trouble I'm having here is trying to balance the near shore and the far shore(you can't see this part in the little crop), the further away the shoreline is, the less defined the rock shapes get so, the reflectivity is appearing as a 'silvery' band on the far bank of the pond, playing with the intensity and roughness levels does help to some extent but, when one side looks nice, the other doesn't. I'm trying to find a happy medium at the moment.
I've tried, using the distance shader, to stop the reflections appearing to the eye far away and then trying to add a secondary reflective shader to that bank with convincing settings but the thing with that is, the distance shader needs a colour to fade to and I don't want black rocks.
I've also tried using the distance shader with no colours applied, only the distance values, to no effect at all.

WIP...

[rcallicotte]

Looking forward to this.

[Will]

dito

[dandelO]

Me too!

[Will]

I would hope so.

[Tangled-Universe]

Cheers folks, I'll post it as soon as it's done...
Yup, TU, the surface is looking a little too shiny at the moment, it's at the close but no cigar stage for now. I don't like to hijack the thread but, the real trouble I'm having here is trying to balance the near shore and the far shore(you can't see this part in the little crop), the further away the shoreline is, the less defined the rock shapes get so, the reflectivity is appearing as a 'silvery' band on the far bank of the pond, playing with the intensity and roughness levels does help to some extent but, when one side looks nice, the other doesn't. I'm trying to find a happy medium at the moment.
I've tried, using the distance shader, to stop the reflections appearing to the eye far away and then trying to add a secondary reflective shader to that bank with convincing settings but the thing with that is, the distance shader needs a colour to fade to and I don't want black rocks.
I've also tried using the distance shader with no colours applied, only the distance values, to no effect at all.

WIP...

I think there's a remedy to this problem, it just came into my mind
So I've never tried this myself before but I think it should work because it is quite logically actually, ok here it goes:

Go to your main sunlight-node and disable "specular highlights".
Add another sun and let this sun control the specular highlights. Make sure it doesn't cast any shadows or glows, just only enable the specular highlights.
Now you have a seperate lightsource which controls the specular highlights.
I think increasing the elevation of the 2nd sun (maybe even to 90 degrees?) will increase the specular effect on a greater part of your image.
You should be able to control the specular highlights either adjusting the strength of the 2nd sun or adjusting the default shader's options.

I'll try it myself when I've time but don't hesitate to try it yourself

Martin

[dandelO]

I think there's a remedy to this problem, it just came into my mind Smiley
So I've never tried this myself before but I think it should work because it is quite logically actually, ok here it goes:

Go to your main sunlight-node and disable "specular highlights".
Add another sun and let this sun control the specular highlights. Make sure it doesn't cast any shadows or glows, just only enable the specular highlights.
Now you have a seperate lightsource which controls the specular highlights.
I think increasing the elevation of the 2nd sun (maybe even to 90 degrees?) will increase the specular effect on a greater part of your image.
You should be able to control the specular highlights either adjusting the strength of the 2nd sun or adjusting the default shader's options.

I'll try it myself when I've time but don't hesitate to try it yourself Wink Grin

Martin

Now that is a good idea, I see only one slight problem with it though... Since the scene has water, aswell as reflective surfaces, the specularity effects of the second Sun will affect both of these components, e.g. reducing the 2nd sunlight strength to dampen some of the bank reflectivity will in turn reduce the effect on the pond aswell. Obviously this can be fixed by refining the waters' reflectivity/ref' spread etc, though so, once I've messed around with a few ideas I still have, I 'll probably try it out.

Cheers, man!

dandelO./Also a "Martin"

[Tangled-Universe]

That's one aspect I overlooked indeed.
As you already said yourself you can work around this by tweaking the water shader's reflectivity options.
It will probably be quite tedious, but once you have the right values you're on a roll and you can probably use them among most of your scenes. Also by the time you've figured out the right values you also understand the right relations/proportions between the sun's strength and reflectivity settings.
Sounds a bit vague I hope you know what I mean.

Martin

[dandelO]

The silvery sheen I was talking about above, is due to GI.
Without GI and extra lights set up, the wet stones have the right look to them.
Now, if I could just balance the rest of the scene...