Well I gave water in P5 another try, but I just can't quite get it! Any suggestions? Tips? Tutorials? lol

This is a test image I've been working on to figure out P5 glass and water for myself. Ignore the glass Vicki. Is this something like the sort of water you want? In a moment I'll post a screenshot of the material nodes.

Well, I can see a few problems. 1) No apparent reflection 2) No apparent refraction 3) No displacement 4) You can see the sky under the water (as opposed to reflecting on the surface) I suspect you are rendering against a background.. might be better to put your JPG on a square or something similar. Try turning on reflection, refraction, and displacement. The BASE of the material (colors, appearance, etc) looks pretty darn good. I think you just need to do some fine tuning.

Ajax, looks good.

OK, here's the material set up. First, to stop your water looking flat, you need some displacement to give you waves. You can see I have a fractal plugged into the displacement channel. For your image you'll want to increas the scale of that fractal to put the waves further apart and turn down the displacement to make it flatter. After all, you want to be able to see what's under the water properly, so you want really gentle waves on the surface. Next, water both refracts and reflects so you'll need raytracing turned on with about 4 to 8 bounces. The refractive index of water is about 1.3333. You can see that's what I have as the index of refraction in the refract node. To get a realistic balance between refraction and reflection, make sure that the refraction value and the reflection value add up to one. In my example, 40% of light hiting the water is being reflected and 60% is being refracted. You probably want a little less reflection, so you can see more of what's under the water. The phong node in the alternate specular just gives you control over the highlights on the waves. The three collapsed nodes that are feeding into the reflection background are just telling P5 that if there isn't anything to reflect, it should show a reflection of the wall texture instead. That stops it showing Poser grey when it reflects empty space. In your case you want to put a cloudy blue sky where those are, to match your sky background.

And here's a working P5 magnifying glass (just because I feel like showing off). In a week or two when I have a few water materials I'm happy with, I'll put this magnifier in the freebies along with a few glass and water materials.

If P5 could simulate the sun better, you could burn a hole in your background with that thing! grin

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Ajax, your water looks perfect! Now if you could put step by step on a page that would be so cool :) I am going to print out what you posted, but sometimes old ladies are dense ;o) I did Hve ground turned on and my background was on a one sided square. So back to the beginning and see if I can get it any better :) Thanks!

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that water looks really good. Can you put this up in the tutorial section? Thanks

This is some useful info, thanks a lot!

Attached Link: http://www.stu-runham.co.uk/water.htm

I have a tutorial on my site

Ajax, I'll definately be keeping a look out for the materials!!! Oh and since you're in the 'showing off' mode :-) could you show us how you'd do water in a hot tub? It's something I've played around in my head but not actually got around to. Would you just use more extreme displacement?

tbird10, going to read your tutorial now ;) Thanks!

If anyone wants an animated displacement map for ripples and the like, look here:

http://www.renderosity.com/messages.ez?Form.ShowMessage=1106990

I'm not sure about hot tubs, PabloS. Truth is, I've never been in one and I don't have much of an idea of what they look like. Looks like Tbird has the tute covered, so I'll let that go for the moment. Cool map, LD. That's going straight to the hard drive :-)

Attached Link: http://www.artesianspas.com/

Ajax, Here's a sample image at the link. It's basically more "turbulent."

Well, turbulence you can do just by making the displacement a bit more noisy, but all that foam stuff looks like it's going to need another texture blended in to create foamy patches. I'm really just starting out with this P5 material stuff, so it could be a while before I'm good enough to make something like that. I'll keep it in mind as I learn though.

My tutorial covers 'foam' to a degree

Thanks tbird. I'll have to take a look at that some more.