Water edge

[Shimakaze]

Does someone have any tips for how to make the edge of water (beach or lakeside) blend properly with the land geometry? I'm trying to get rid of the hard edges, preferably in a procedural way that works with animation.

Also, any chance of a native physically correct water shader for Max?

[super gnu]

vray distance tex! you can use it to fade out the reflections in the last little bit towards the shoreline (or blur them)

you can even use it with gradient ramp (in mapped mode) to put some little ripples in.. fully procedural.

[Shimakaze]

Yea that's what I've been trying to do, but removing the reflections tend to make the edge more apparent in my case, not less. I will keep trying and see what I can come up with.

[super gnu]

yes its quite tricky to adjust, i found blurring the reflections as well helped a bit.

is it because without the reflections it gets darker at the edge? can try with your water surface is excluded from gi and shadowcasting (not always ideal of course) and you also need to get the fog colour bias just right so its 100% clear by the edge. a negative value can help.

[Nkal]

You can try Vray material and fog bias with gradient or vraydirt AO material controlling the edges creating a gradient where the water comes into contact with the island object, the idea is to have denser fog as water gets deeper and nearly fully transparent as it gets closest to the object, secondly you may play with reducing the bump or displacement map as the water gets close to the object's edges, this will prevent any unnecessary extreme reflections around the edges of the island, ideally touch glossiness at the very end if you have to. deal more with fog and refractions. in real life it is the density of water created by the depth which gives all those illusions, so we have to fake all that here. look into references as much as possible.

lastly make sure your island model has a shore line extending into the water and that it is not just cut out going straight into the water at say 90 degrees but rather gradually in, this would help with all the above.

good luck.