Agitation control for water?

[PabloMack]

I looked around at the user interface of TG2 searching for something to control the amount of ripple in the water.  In 1979 I was on a trip to Baja California and we took the ferry from St. Rosalia to Guaymas and the wind was absolutely still.  In mid-Gulf (Sea of Cortez) the sea was literally glass-smooth and you could see a near perfect reflection of the full moon.  I've never seen anything like it before nor since.  I wish I'd had my digital camera back then.  Anyway, is there a slider that will control the agitation of the water?  

[Oshyan]

I'm not entirely clear what you mean by "amount of ripple". If you mean literal "ripples", as in responding to an object or shore, that's something that takes a bit of doing, either a custom image-based displacement, or some function node wizardry. If you simply mean wave scale and/or roughness, that's much simpler.

At the simplest level, the Water Shader has Roughness, Wave Scale, and Smallest Scale settings. The Roughness basically does what it sounds like, controlling how rough or choppy the wave shapes are. This is similar to the Roughness settings in the fractal noise nodes (Power Fractal). Wave Scale controls the average wave size, and Smallest Scale controls the smallest wave size, thus establishing a general "octave range" for the noise function of the water. The Water Shader node basically has a customized Power Fractal-like noise function, with these controls exposed.

If you want more control, you can actually turn down Roughness to 0 to get totally smooth water then attach a Power Fractal to the input of the Water Shader and use its displacement settings to get more specific results. The details of Power Fractal settings and their effects would be a different, more general subject of course.

- Oshyan

[PabloMack]

Thank you.  This answers my questions.  I now see that clicking on the water shader that is fed into the Lake's input node brings up its parameter screen.  There seem to be quite a few parameters that I can adjust.  Why does this Water Shader node not show up in the Node List at the upper left corner of the UI?  (Sorry.  I first said right but I meant left)

[Seth]

errrr.... where do you want that your water shader node appear ?! in the upper right corner of the UI ? can you post a screen capture of the place you're talkin' about ?

maybe you should try to get used a bit to TG2 UI... I know it could be a bit difficult, at the beginning, but i can assure you, that if you really start to try to get used to it, everything will seem to be exactly where it should be

[Oshyan]

Actually in this case he's correct - the Water Shader node doesn't appear in the shader list on the left, as you would expect it to by general UI convention. This is really just a long-standing issue which should be dealt with. I'll make sure it's in the issue tracker and have it addressed in a future release. Unless I'm mistaken and there's a good reason for it not showing up, in which case we might want to reevaluate that.

- Oshyan