Assistance needed - Shallow water + caustics

[Largent]

I'm trying to make a scene of sand flats such as those found in the Bahamas. The way these work is its a sandy bottom that is covered by about 3-4 feet of water all the way to the horizon. I need to figure out how to get the water the right transparency and color and how to get the caustics effect (I have a mac so the caustics generator program posted on the forums wont work for me unless a generous forum member would be willing to make an image shader for me...) and I also need to figure out how to get a small island on the horizon without the use of a program like worldmachine (again it wont work on my mac).

I'll post a tgd once I get a basic plan of attack, so until then any general tips and tricks would be great. I'm very new to all this so even an outline of how to do the basic stuff would be great  .

[bobbystahr]

I make caustics quite easily with a tile-able caustics map made in an app call Caustics Generator I got somewhere but I'm sure you could find a tile-able colour one online that you can make a grayscale copy of it for this technique.
In the water shader go to the Sub-surface tab and at:
Volume1 density function load an image map shader that you load your grayscale caustic map into. [ Create new shader> Colour Shader > Image map shader] and Go to Image map shader with the + sign again and then set mapping to Plan Y(edges XZ), experiment with the Size and also enable Repeat x and y in the Flip Repeat Tab.
Back at the Sub-surface tab adjust the Volume 1 density to .5 to start. Oh yeah the water should be full transparency [1] and as deep as the water.
If you wish you can use the colour map you made the grayscale from to colour the water volume with Volume 1 colour using the exact same method and parameters as the Volume steps but with the colour map of course.
To get the small island on the horizon generate a terrain in the terrain tab and in that tab near the bottom adjust the Border blending to get rid of the edges... add water, center your camera on the island and with the camera a fair bit above the water ZOOM OUT. Pretty soon your scene will resemble the photo you posted.. ...

[dandelO]

It just so happens that I have a set of shaders called precisely 'shallow water and caustics' in vol.1 of my public library. You will find the shallow water and caustics shaders in the file called 'TG2 warped voronoi caustics.tgd'. It does not use any image maps.
It might need a bit of work, it was a while ago I made these... I'll go digging for a clipfile, I think I have it about somewhere close by.

If I don't, you can find my Public Library by clicking on the link to my website beneath my name in any of my posts or, in my user profile here. I may be back...

The default settings in the file that is preset looks like this:
[attachimg=#]

[bobbystahr]

d'oh...totally forgot about that...aren't they available either here or at ashundar?