I have developed a new way to make "Fake Transparent Water".
I have altered the water shader by using a merge shader to combine the water shader with an image shader.
1.The image shader is used to overlay a "through the camera" version of the scene without any water or other
objects, as illustrated in the top image. I found a POV I liked and then rendered the first image. I then made some minor modifications to this image ie... caustics and saved it.
2. The merge shader is used to combine the water shader with the image created earlier. The water shader is plugged into the input port of the merge shader, and the image shader into the shader "A" port. I left all of the merge settings to their default except for the "Mix to A" setting which I set to .2 this can be adjusted, the higher this number the more the image will show through.
This technique works well with still images it made be too cumbersome for animations, as every change in the camera position would require a new image.
Hope this information is helpful. Enjoy! :)
Cool, thank you very much for your efforts! :-)
Very nice. Thanks for the explanation. Sounds useful.
For animation, you 'only' need to run the anim twice. Once without water, and once with. Only problem is it takes a lot of work to set the image shader for every frame.
Can it also be tweeked to have less transparency where the water gets deeper?
I have used a distance shader inline with the image shader with some success, still perfecting it though.
Quote from: sonshine777 on April 21, 2007, 05:47:56 PM
I have developed a new way to make "Fake Transparent Water".
Hope this information is helpful. Enjoy! :)
Hello sonshine777.........Indeed you have and yes it was very helpful. I read about this in, of all places, the Vue Forum at Renderosity in a thread about Vue doing water as well as TG2 and dandelO posted a few examples using your brilliant technique. Attached is a small first test render using fairly lo res(.25 detail render) subsurface image. Thanx very much...many pats on the back friend of TG2.. ...
Tanks Bobby, I hope to have some progress images posted soon. I have been really busy working on finishing some camoes.
hey i tried too ! that's fun !
(http://i22.servimg.com/u/f22/10/05/42/42/cailla10.jpg)
(http://i22.servimg.com/u/f22/10/05/42/42/sweet_10.jpg)
nice results seth.......
can I ask sonshine......how did you add caustics in photoshop?
Astonishing results, Seth. I'm tempted to say these look like photos. Nice!
thanks dude ! :D
oh here is the tgd of the second one... if someone wanna try another POV or lighting or anything...
Thanks Seth!
yeah thanx for the tgd
de nada !
Indeed thanx very much...it's always helpful to have many takes on a technique...often leads to new discovery....love this forum.. ...
Quote from: dhavalmistry on September 29, 2007, 12:05:34 PM
nice results seth.......
can I ask sonshine......how did you add caustics in photoshop?
The caustics in this thread is created in a caustics generator, then rendered as a surface layer that did not go above the waterline. I think I did touch up the image a little before using it as the underwater merge image. I am currently rendering a couple of new images and will post them probably on Monday with some tgc's and node screen shots,
By the way keep up the great work seth
Looking forward to it sonshine777 :)
mmmh Sonshine, did you get some niiice result with the distance shader on fake transparency ?
it's been a while so i dig this topic up ^^