Here's a question Iv'e been wanting to ask. WHAT I WANT: A tropical beach water as shown in the first 2 pics. The water starts out transparent in the shallow areas, as it gets deeper it turns greenish/emerald, then it gets more blue as as the depth increases. WHAT I'M GETTING: So far regular Bryce water doesn't seem to behave this way, the bottom left pic is a sandy terrain with "Carribean Resort" water. The one on the right has a little bit of that depth but it's not because of the water! it's the terrain. hehehe. I just used altitude color. It still looks kinda funny. Does anyone have any other way to attack this problem?

Hmmm.... do you think you could post a screenshot of the water material? Might help... Also, is this a water plane, a slab, or a terrain water? If a terrain, is it set to solid? Just some questions... (bows)

You mean something like this? This was a bit of a challenge to figure out which is what I like. :) Create your beach terrain then use a cube and make it the same size as your terrain and apply the carribean resort water material. Now select the terrain and go to the editor/pictures and copy to get the G2H, will will use this for several things in the alpha channel. Exit terrain editor. Now select the cube and set the material as pictured above. Paste the g2h in the B channel of the material editor using picture (like you would if you were using a .jpg for a texture). Make sure you paste it in both the color and alpha sections (1st and 2nd boxes). Presto, now where it nears the beach it's clear and where it's deeper it's a darker blue. :)

One important note, if you don't make this so one cube and terrain cover the entire field of view and instead decide to go with tiling terrains (you'll have to copy each g2h of the terrain to the corresponding cube of water) make sure that when you have everything in place select all the cubes of water, make them positive then group them. Otherwise you'll get these nasty grids making it look like the water is actually cubes instead of all one body of water.

Thanks for the info

Wow, that's an awesome technique. Thanks much, now lemme try it. hehehe.

G2H?

greyscale to height. The displacement method used by the Terrain Editor

When you create an infinite water plain, you can select 'Volume' via a little v beneath the create pallette. This creates a water plain that you can control the depth of the water with......

Bryster that's true but the water is a uniform transparency and color. It doesn't work the way it's supposed to. As the water gets shallower it should get clearer which the way I posted above helps acheive.

I have an idea I want to try tonight when i get home, will post then whether success or not.

Aldaron: I think some of the Bryce Water presets allow for this...........

I was up late last night cracking this nut and I have a solution using volume color, altitude, and a volumetric slab. A cube could also be used if the camera is in tight and you don't see the edges of the cube but I chose a slab because it is an infinite volume - kinda like the ocean ; ) First of all you were on the right track using the altitude color, but you need to use it in the water - here's how. I'm going to upload a series of jpegs to explain it so hang on. -Scott

1st step - you need to add a volumetric slab to your scene.

2nd step - start with a preset and make a new material - click on volume blend -altitude.

step 3 - add the basic altitude texture and modify in the DTE

step 4 - make the channels and colors look like this in the shallow texture editor. The altitiude is driving where the color goes from transparent color to volume color - mostly clear to deep blue. Notice we only use the transparency channel globally. This gives full control to allow murkiness if needed ; )

Here's a test image showing a beach terrain - and the deep pools get colored by the volume color. Notice the deep distant water is full blue and the shallows are mostly clear. I hope this mini-tut helps you with your current and future tropical scenes. -Scott : )

That works much better than my solution, I'm going to try it now.

Go for it. Your solution was very creative Aldaron - mine's just easier to apply generically. I'd love to see a test image. Scott

Scott, that's great! I saved this page for future reference. Thanx!

Definitely go with Scott's solution. It may take some tweaking of materials and the altitude filter in the DTE to get what you want but it's well worth it. I added some abience to the water material and TIR since light bounces all around in water. And to get the sand darker at the water's edge I just copied the G2h and brought it into photopaint then smeared the darker areas further into the light area until I got it where I wanted then used it in the diffusion value channel.

Wondeful work, Scott! I've always wondered how to mate the Altitude Blend with the DTE filters, and there it is! Thanks for the tips, everyone...

LOL, I was just going to do exactly this (finally got home - it's 22:33 here). Thanks for confirming my hunch! (and saving me a bunch of work even if you didn't know about it!)

A closer look

Awesome! Glad everyone is having fun with it. Yeah it does take tweaking the altitude in the DTE but the results are sure worth it. Also you can paint in some terrain details in the pools and they will look like reefs below. Have fun! Scott

Gee thanks guys!!! These are brilliant ideas!!!