A little water testing..

[dbuchhofer]

Its a variation on the old water material that Vlado posted ages back.. (Adjusted to look like the nasty river around here!)

Renders are a bit slow.. about 6minutes/frame before even putting in any of the context of the site, so i dont know that i'll be able to use it for this animation, But i liked the look of it.. Here goes..

Mpeg1 version.. 2.6mb

Mpeg2 version.. 3.3mb

64x480 each, mpeg2 looks better of course

[Smalerbi]

I like it!! I think it looks pretty good. Slow renders with water…this is always the money shot. Would you mind sharing your technique or material?

Thanks,

Scott.

[losbellos]

this took too much time to render, what machine dod u use?

[dbuchhofer]

It was on I believe a dual 1800 amd.. (1.3g? thereabouts)

The time killer was the translucency, which helps the image, but imho, not enough to justify a 5 minute time jump per frame

The material as that stands up above was this:


its not terribly complicated, the Translucency Thickness and Fog Multipliers control the falloff and color depth of the waters 'murk'.. The parameters vary greatly from scene to scene depending on the scale.. twiddle.. its fun. The effect was not terribly visible in the scene I posted above.. but its there for when theres more detail and underwater modeling done.. The waves are just an animated bump map that was cannibilized from one of the Darktree standard materials and adjusted to fit my needs here.. Tried a few with displacement to get a little bit more accurate accounting of the waves on the shore, but the look was subtle enough to not be worth the extra time/frame

An idea that popped into my head while doing this but just isn't in the scope would be to have the terrain act as a volume select soft slelection of the water surface and have that add in some secondary waves off of the shore in the main mesh (Pre-bump, high res, whereas its currently just a flat plane..) using the push modifiers with varying waveforms on the keys.. Mabye not worth the experimentation, but its an idea for folks who dont want to shell out the money for one of the two waterplane plugs

[metroberlin]

do you work with dreamscape ? i have the impression, that the subsurface from the dreamscape sea material looks very very good and it seems to be much faster than the vray mat. just an impression, didn´t test it deeply.

[metroberlin]

ähem...now i have read how the waves were done, sorry

[dbuchhofer]

Heheh, Sadly the 'splurge on plugins' budget for this year is quite spent i think..

It may be faster.. I'm sure theres also a much faster way to do this translucency with multiple layers (Probably what will end up doing if its worth the look) But practical information on compositing techniques is not terribly easy to come by, so experimentation is needed

I'm getting into some water simulation now with Realflow 2 for a different scene (Can you tell water is the key factor here?! /shiver).. Nifty program, if a bit on the cumbersome side to actually use.. Working great for the high detail shots..

Enter utter-nerb-mode:
Now i've got a question for a few of you more experienced folks.. Particles.. How on earth do you get a stream of particles to look cohesive? Is there some major trick somewhere with materials to get things to actually look good? I'm thinking motion blur comes in *VERY* handy with this sort of thing, but combining motion blur with any sort of opacity or raytraced material starts to get TERRIBLY slow.. Anyway, Open to any kind of suggestion on Water/Smoke/Particles..