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I'm guessing you need to define the material zones separately for each cube face somehow. Is that done using the Geometry Editor tool? (I'm at work without access to Daz Studio at the moment).
So, yeah, it works fine!
Though you really need to tesselate the beejebus out of the cube. I have an 8 mb obj file, and the waves look a bit too smooth, still, because of scale. I had tesselated the entire cube, but I think I'm going to see how well it turns out if I only tesselate the top (the part I'm morphing)
I'd appreciate knowing how it turns out and what to do to replicate it, if you wouldn't mind sharing.
I'm not sure you need to have a closed geometry for volumetrics to work.
In Lagoon Living I used a water plane with volumetrics and it works fine. I'm guessing the shader detects which way the normals of the plane are pointing, and keeps the volumetric effect to the other side.
Also, don't forget in render settings to activate the caustics optimizer.
Yes there is a big difference in realism when it comes to refraction. No volume means parts under the water are magnified, with volume they are not. I have tested this to destruction and this is what I found. But hey if you can't see under the water from above the water then it doesn't really matter. So far I think they are 3 different ways to do water and each one in the right situation will look ok and pass.
Yep this is what I use! I apply one of the liquid shaders to cube, insert a water normal map, hit the cube with a spotlight at an angle and it looks great.
Now if there was a way to create foam that would be neat. I watched a tutorial for Blender how to do a procedural generated foam texture and my head spun.
I have managed to save out a foam layer from Blender but until I can get it looking good in Blender first I must say it looks crap in Iray. :)
Holy! It does! It can even mostly figure it out with just a plane in the scene. I'm weirded out
Behold! 2 planes. The bottom one one is a simple diffuse material and the top one a water material with some absorption and scattering. its not even enclosed. It's lit by a spotlight. Lookit that gorgeous aux viewport.
If you have something like Carrara, easy:
Make a cube with, say, 6 intervals (or whatever it is). Geo editor, select the top polygons and create a new surface from them (like 'top' or 'surface' or whatever). Export as obj.
Import it into Carrara (or whatever), select the top facets. Tesselate a few times (I prefer to keep the square polygons, not sure how much it matters) until it looks solid. If your machine locks up and is unresponsive for 15 minutes, you've gone too far!
Export to a new obj.
Import it back into Daz.
Get some cloudy/wave texture map or generate it with Filterforge/Photoshop/whatever.
Run Elevate script only on top surface, use map.
Now here's the mind-blower... you can use the wave map to create a geoshell 'foam' surface on top of the waves.
Result.
Note that the water is a preset from a shader pack I'm working on (that will be available for free on ShareCG in the next few weeks (though I encourage users to donate))
Wow nice.
That looks really good, Will!
The key elements were:
Getting good waves, a bump map to get finer detail, good lighting.
The shader itself was mainly a blue-green refraction color and a blue transmitted color. Value should be maxed or close, saturation should be on the low side. Tweak to taste.
Some fun I had a few weeks ago testing Refraction/Reflection using a cube. There are three cubes stacked. One for the water, one for the surface and one for the walls. I used the Geometry Tool to hide some faces on some cubes and make new surfaces on others. Why three cubes? Because there are three different elements with differing IOR settings. Hard walls at 1.5, Water at 1.33 and air at the surface at 1.0 which is the bump map in the Cutout Channel for the wave shadows. Caustics are also turned on.
Click on image for full size
How did you position the cubes? Are they exactly aligned, or is one inside another (and if so, how big of a gap), or do they intersect?
I have read a few times that Iray likes the liquid mesh to intersect the other, say the sides of a swimming pool, etc.
man that is so true of Iray, so mesh dependent on a lot of things. I tried a dense mesh with Normal Mapping, the results were bad. Apply Sub-D, nope, Tried Displacement maps and using the shader Sub-d, up to 5, got a better results but still not good enough. Tried Blender ocean sim, subdivided the hell out of it. Extruded the outer edges down and closed the bottom. Uv unwrapped it and got a convincing result in caustics and wave formation. Just needs that added feature of convincing white break water.
Yeah, the ripple pattern I used for the sea is a little too smooth. I need to get a more hard-edged/veiny ripple pattern, I think.
I think the white caps look... ok, but not really foam-tips.
An IRay water tutorial would be incredibly helpful. I'm still getting my feet wet in Daz (bad pun alert), so although I'm starting to better understand the basics of some of these parameters, what I'm really lacking is a combination of the how and why to do certain things.
For example, when Fishtales says, "...air at the surface at 1.0 which is the bump map in the Cutout Channel for the wave shadows," I know what some of the different terms mean, but am lost by what this all means in combination. I'm guessing there is an "air cube" where one of the surfaces contains the bump map applied to the Cutout Channel and thus somehow projects the ripple pattern contained in the map through the water and onto the wall edge, which is probably another cube surface. But how is that projection accomplished and where is the air cube in relation to the water's surface? Does just turning on Caustics accomplish this?
And when Szark says, "...IRay likes the liquid mesh to intersect the other, say sides of a swimming pool, etc." that by "intersect, he means that the liquid cube overlaps the pool cube, such that if we looked at the back side of the scene, we would see the water on the opposite side of the pool "wall".
I respect that most of you experienced Daz and Poser users developed your knowledge over many years of trial and error and experimentation, so I hope my questions don't come across as lazy. I have no problem experimenting, but would definitely prefer to do so with some notion of how and why rather than fumbling blindly.
Any insights/help is greatly appreciated!
Yeah the pun got me laughing.
Yes that is exactly what I meant but it only needs a little overlap. See you got it in one.
I don't know all of what Fishtales said, but the other part is basically if you have a water volume in another thing, like a pool or glass, the engine will work better if you have the water overlapping the container rather than trying to fit it exactly (because it'll never be exact)
As for the rest, it's not terribly hard.
Refraction Index is obvious, it's the Index of Refraction. Water should always be 1.33
Refraction weight is how much refraction. While standard water is set to 1, it's not a bad idea to set it a scootch lower, like .95, so that the water surface shows a little better.
For a water volume, you want Thin Shell set to Off; this only works on an actual 3D object, not a plane, and you can't have any Cutout Opacity (anything less than 1 and it shuts off all volumetric effects).
Refraction color matters if you set Share Glossy Inputs to Off (which you should probably do). When it's on, Refraction qualities = Glossy qualities. Refraction Roughness makes water 'blurry,' and is good if you are modeling something not-quite-water, like slime or some form of gel.
Refraction color basically colors the volume, and is good with caustic effects (light changing color as it goes through). If you are interested in caustics (like a shot of whiskey), go into render settings and set Caustic filter to On. (It calculates caustic effects more betterer)
Transmitted color is like refraction color, but only applies after a certain distance.
SSS basically makes things cloudy. I reallyreallyreally wished it worked like 'cloud fades in based on depth set by SSS distance, and then the amount by Strength.' But it freakin doesn't. ARGH. No, you have cloudiness basically set by SSS Strength/Distance and that's that. Bah.
SSS Direction is interesting, though -- it focuses the apparent SSS effect either along the path of light (+ values) or back toward the light (- values). I've found good godrays can be pulled off if you have a sharp lightsource and high SSS values, particularly if the light is aimed roughly at the camera.
Cheers, thanks!
Thank you very much for this, Will! It's these sorts of details that are hard to find elsewhere, or at least without hours of fruitless forum searching. Between your and Szark's responses I feel like I have a good starting point for experimenting. Much appreciated.
This one uses Breaking Waves and I used clouds from another set for the spray around the ship.
Click on image for full size.
These are from below the waves :)
This was an HDRI test and I used Ocean Wide.
Underwater, I find SSS is incredibly finicky with light and camera.
It took me dozens of adjustments, moving the lighting angle, adjusting SSS, to get this. Sometimes I'd get no sss effect, sometimes everything would go nearly black (why? I HAVE NO IDEA), sometimes everything would be a giant fog.
Really happy with the result, though!
http://willbear.deviantart.com/art/Undersea-Scene-629635438
nice work man
That looks terrific, Will. Wow.