Water Texture

[mel rudland]

Please can someone let me know how to create water for a swimming pool using Vray and Sketchup 2018. Many thanks

[GD3DESIGN]

To manually create water material from scratch: create new generic material, set diffuse color to black, reflection to pretty close to all white, and refraction to full white with refraction IOR to 1.33. Then, to color your water, set the fog color to desired hue(you'll need to play around with saturation and level of color while doing test renders). The key setting to make your water look right is fog intensity. With model units set to inches, I usually start at .005 fog intensity and go from there(generally, the higher the number, the darker more opaque the water gets, the lower the number the lighter and more transparent it will be). The fog color will change what intensity you'll need to set, as well as how deep/shallow the water is, etc.(shallow water will appear lighter and deeper water darker with the same settings.) Once you get the water looking good for your scene, its time to add movement/surface disturbance,....unless you're doing a really calm pool and want a glassy surface. You can add a noise texture into the bump map slot and play around with size/intensities until it suits your taste for the particular scene.

But the easiest way to do it these days is just load one of the water materials from the built in library in the asset editor. They'll give you a good starting point, then while doing region renders to test settings, refer to the above instructions to tweak the material to your liking. Play around with the bump intensity and the parameters of the texture used in the bump slot ( a lot times its a noise texture, but also smoke texture is used.) Again, the fog settings will be big in determining the look of your water. I find that, among other things, I have to lower the fog intensity setting a great deal with most of the water material presets,.....but every scene is different!

[stefanoascari]

GD3DESIGN Would you use this in conjuction with a the water displacement map (As shown here: https://docs.chaosgroup.com/display/VRAYRHINO/Water). Thanks for your explanation, it was very helpful!!

[GD3DESIGN]

Hey Stefano,
Generally, you would pick one and go with it....be it noise, smoke, or water tex. I only recently noticed the water tex, (I've always used noise), and used it water tex in a render for some river water and it came out nicely. It really depends what effect you're going for. I do a lot of tranquil pool renders, so a nice subtle noise texture usually does the trick. The procedural water texture is pretty powerful and can even be used in animations. So for each scene, its good to play around with the different textures and amounts until you find what suits that particular render.

You may also find some useful info in this thread where we're currently discussing how to produce caustics in pool water----> https://forums.chaosgroup.com/forum/...563-pool-water

Cheers!
GD

[stefanoascari]

GD3DESIGN Thank you. That is very helpful! I will check out the other thread as well.