New to rendering, could need some help!!!!!!

[jcarchitecture]

Hi like I said I'm new to Vray for Sketchup. I built this model to try out some materials. I'm not quite satisfied. The pool water doesn't look like pool water. The color, the transparency and even the relexion. I'm writting this to get help from anyone out there. Comments and tips will be appreciated.

Thanks in advance

[dalomar_cg]

Re: New to rendering, could need some help!!!!!!

If you want specific help on a material, then you'll need to post more information in regards to your material settings, and with reflection, what's going on within your environment. An example of the current results are also useful as well.

[jcarchitecture]

Re: New to rendering, could need some help!!!!!!

http://s709.photobucket.com/albums/ww96/jcarchitecture/

Here is whats going on with my water material and also an the environment settings. I also need to mention that the relfexion in the water is done with PhotoShop and not Vray, but I would like to do so with Vray. You can find all of the images on the site above

[dalomar_cg]

Re: New to rendering, could need some help!!!!!!

Well, there's your problem. I'm not sure exactly what you mean by the reflection being done in photo shop, but you will probably get more success from using fresnel reflections and having it reflect the environment. If you want a different environment, then you can override that from the environment options within the material, but just taking an image and slapping it on reflection isn't really going to work.

[jcarchitecture]

Re: New to rendering, could need some help!!!!!!

Thanks for responding so fast. For the water material, when i click on the M in the reflection layer, it is check Fresnel (Fresnel IOR 1.55 and Refract 1.55) unless I really don't understand what you are saying. It's possible, I'm still new at this. And also I don't quite understand what u mean in ur last sentence (you can override that from the environment options within the material, but just taking an image and slapping it on reflection isn't really going to work).

Thank you for your patience

[dalomar_cg]

Re: New to rendering, could need some help!!!!!!

Going off your image I only see one parameter that's mapped, which is the reflection value. Therefore I was assuming that the settings in the texture editor (which are for an image) are related to the reflection value.

[jcarchitecture]

Re: New to rendering, could need some help!!!!!!

Ah ok now I get it. Know the texture editor was used for bump mapping. Can you give me any advice on how I can make this render better and how to adjust the pool material to make it look better.

I think I might be losing my english language abilities ... lol....that's what I get for attending a french University

[dalomar_cg]

Re: New to rendering, could need some help!!!!!!

Looking closer I noticed that your refraction layer is transparent. Generally you don't need to worry about setting transparency for refraction since you can already "see through" the refraction layer. Try setting that back to black and see if that helps.

[Jackson_cg]

Re: New to rendering, could need some help!!!!!!

JC,

If you copy and paste the Photobucket IMG link you can embed the image straight into your post, it saves others having to surf your album to find the relevant image and put up with all that Photobucket advertising and the bandwidth it eats up.

For most arch visualisations I use just a single face for the surface of water, no diffuse map, just very very dark bluey green colour (e.g. 12,38,25), no refraction layer, transparency 242, 242, 242 (or 5 in SU opacity terms) a reflection layer set to fresnel (Fresnel colour 255,255,255 white and and Refraction colour 24,24,24 and both IORs set to 1.5).

I usually use the attached tiling ripple bump map- by varying the multiplier and repeat parameters it's good for everything from calm architectural ponds to moderately windy lakes and open water (in the attached murky harbour image it's set with a multiplier of 1 and repeat of 0.001).

I discovered that probably the most important thing (after a decent bump map) is that the diffuse colour be set to very dark- and the same often applies for other very reflective materials like chrome. When I started out I used light diffuse colours for water, chrome, etc, but I noticed that the parts that were less reflective (because of the fresnel settings) didn't become very dark as they do in reality- they came out rather grey which makes for a "cloudy" reflective effect. Probably everyone else knows this already (or knows another smarter way to achieve this effect!), but for me it was counter-intuitive to make give chrome a 0,0,0 diffuse colour even if it was rather more logical that water should actually be very dark if you disregard its transparency.

Of course if you're going for ultra realism you can add refraction, and mess around with enclosed water volumes and fog settings and (gasp!) caustics, but for arch vis I just keep it simple (and fast!).

[thomthom]

Re: New to rendering, could need some help!!!!!!

I use the same method as Jackson. Seem to work fine for ARch Viz work.

[remon_v]

Re: New to rendering, could need some help!!!!!!

I tried the watermaterial settings but mine doen'st look nearly as good as yours:



It's just a quick test with 2 planes and a vray sky and a 360 sky bg.
Do u know what I did wrong?

also.... a multiplier of 1? is this bump or displacement..... cuz bump with a multiplier of 1 hardly does anything..... in my test I used a multiplier of 10

[thomthom]

Re: New to rendering, could need some help!!!!!!

transparency 242, 242, 242 (or 5 in SU opacity terms)

Do you model a dark space underneath the water? Because if not you'll see straight through the water where there isn't that much reflection.
I tend to keep the diffuse opaque - just very nearly black. Unless I have some views close up to the water edge where you'll see the the dock edge under the water.

[remon_v]

Re: New to rendering, could need some help!!!!!!

that's it thomthom, ty

I just set the transperency to dark gray

also added some random HDRI: