Problem was down to the water surface not casting shadows! Will do another render soon…
weeeeee… here we go, yet another render - finally got that water sorted (thanks olitech!), will look at vray dirt next.
just feel the tropicalness…
Feel like I should be drinking my coffee from a coconut with a long straw this morning!
Nice work!
yes, very nice mcvltd!
the clouds are nice, how did you do them, ere they 3D?
However if you want the tropic look, clouds are a no go, of course, go for a more deep blue sky.
The water looks great, would you mind to share that?
tct70 - hehehe… thanks!
Joost Ink - Thanks also! Good point about the clouds, maybe I’ll leave’em out for the next render. I just added them in quickly in post - I’ve got several high-res maps from HDR Mill and ploped them in - I should really try mix mapping them in with the vray sky.
The water material is basically -
darkish teal diffuse colour
strong fresnel reflections with a slight falloff towards the camera
strong refraction with a falloff set to perp/parallel and an adjustment curve to control it
refraction glossiness set to a falloff with world z depth
refraction ior of 1.3
affect shadows ticked
a bright teal colour for the fog
you’ll have to play with the fog mult to suit your scene
go crazy with mix mapping loads of noise for the bump
cool, thanks.
LOL, nice tropicalness…!
No joke, but i just came back from a Bahamas cruise yesterday!
And…unfortunately for me, there were tons of clouds…crazy cumulus ones. Then it started to rain..waaaaaaaaahhhh!
rotten luck!.. 
…I was hoping for some nice holiday snaps to use as reference pics! 
Had a go with vray dirt but didn’t like the results… I like clean yachts!..but did have a play with caustics and OMG what a difference that makes to the water!
The only problem I’ve got now is that I want to try and fade off the caustics so they don’t just end sharply at the specified radius - a bit like the falloff on standard lights, but just specifically for the photons - is this possible with vray sun? Or will I have to create another light that is just for the caustics?
This one shows the sharp caustic cutoff line in the water a lot better…
wow, way cool.
I want one like that! how much is it?
looks really cool. Its coming on very nicely.
Out of interest, how did you create the wake and spray effect, looks great?
I asked the same thing on your newer thread too!
Thanks for the comments guys.
For this one I used my manufactured ‘plan view’ wake map (I’ll explain that in the other thread) and then stole some spary images from a google image search (they were all pretty low res) and distorted them to fit. There is also a little bit of photoshop work of the top just to integrate it all.
Rob, using the Vray Sun to cast the caustics, you have a ‘photon emit’ radius - this is the area that the caustics will be limited to. So you could basically make this larger and control the ‘falloff’ this way. (Although it’s not actually a fall-off, your just making the area where caustics are happeneing larger.)
you can see it in the previous render as your sun is pointing at the area around the boat which is very light blue and caustics are happening here. you can then see the radial line and outside of this the water is dark blue where caustics aren’t happening… so just make the emit area larger…
I suppose you could do a photoshop blend or post production blend between a sea with causitcs on and a sea with caustics off, and paint in your fall off with masks…?
Thanks SV, will have a play and see what I can come up with.