Realistic water with DAZ Studio 4.8?

MGMOZ

G'day there,

I'm getting more than a little frustrated trying to create realistic water.

In my attempts, I have been able to get the transparency of water but not the distortion & surface reflections etc.They have beaten me so far.

Is there a tutorial or such about this? I'm trying to do it within DAZ Studio 4.8.

I haven't had any formal training in 3D art so it's been a lot of trial & error to get me this far but I want to learn more!

Cheers

Oso3D

I assume you mean 3DL, since Iray is pretty straight-forward.

 

I believe one of the Omnisurface things has an option for refraction, which you want to try turn on and set IOR to 1.33 and then set some displacement.

 

MGMOZ

timmins.william said:

I assume you mean 3DL, since Iray is pretty straight-forward.

 

I believe one of the Omnisurface things has an option for refraction, which you want to try turn on and set IOR to 1.33 and then set some displacement.

 

Ah...unfortunately, Iray is what I mean. I feel like an idiot, can you give me some pointers? I must have missed something basic that's holding me back!

pearbear

Are you starting with the free DAZ Uber Iray Water shader? It's a good start, but doesn't provide any effect of ripples on the surface of the water to make ripply reflections. Getting a ripple effect is often done by applying a Normal or Bump map of a water ripple texture to the water shader. Some DAZ environment sets that include a body of water have a water ripple Normal map included. FirstBastion's excellent Secluded Shoreline set has a good one that you could use for a ripply water shader. Or you can just google image search for "water normal map" and there are hundreds of them out there. Just apply one to the Normal map channel of the Iray water shader.

Oskarsson

Ideally you'll need:

1) Something textured a bit below the surface. The water is semi-transparent so it will show through.

2) As mentioned, a bump or normal map for ripples. Totally still water sometimes happens in pools and such but more often than not, there are some sort of ripple going.

3) Iray skydome should be on so that the water can reflect the sky.

I did a very quick test and I think realistic water is possible!

Szark

if you don't want the water to be clear just drop the refraction strength down

McGyver

If you go to the FilterForge website, there are many distortion filters that produce all sorts of watery effects (but in 2D, of course)... If you go to the Filter Library page, you'll see examples of what each filter does... You can look around for ones that seem to produce an effect similar to what you have in mind and drag the image onto your computer. Make sure they are seamless tiles... They should say it somewhere on the page. You can either download the color image and tweak it in a photo editor if you have one and know how to, or look for filters that have a bump map version of the image... If you are feeling particularly adventurous, download the free trial and actually render out your own version of the filter or experiment... If you go the drag and drop route, I do not believe you can use those dragged and dropped versions of the images in a commercial render, but it is a very cheap and easy way of checking out different effects without going through a ton of model sets... They are also pretty small (480 x480 or 560 x560... Something like that), but I'm pretty sure (98.7767%) whatever you make with the trial version of Filter Forge is okay for commercial use... There is also Genetica, which is basically similar to FF, but slightly different... It has a free version which is called Genetica Viewer, you can render out whatever you need, using that... It doesn't have as much features as full Genetica or Filter Forge, but if you know what you are looking for you can probably wrangle something out out... I think the size restriction is around 2800 x 2800 or so (maybe more or less)...     The images when you find one you, like go into the bump map channel... If you are not sure about this, I'm sure someone else will fill in the missing info (I'm on an iPad, so at the moment I can't really accurately walk ya through it)  If you decide you like this 3D stuff, I highly recommend purchasing either product as they are incredibly useful in 3D work.

Good luck!

Ippotamus

Here is a great tutorial about all things water and Iray.

A great place to start:

http://thinkdrawart.com/water-shader-tutorial-for-daz-studio-iray

Oso3D

Keep in mind that if you use the water shader in Iray, it's a good idea to apply it to a volume, not a plane. So make a cube or something.

Transmitted color will give the water some color in its depths, SSS will make it look cloudy.

 

Szark

tim just reminded me that I used a cube in the above image http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/comment/854244/#Comment_854244