2. Is this type of water material available somewhere? 3. Anyone want to know how to make it?

Uh, yea I'd like to know how to make it in PPP :-)

Sorry requires P5, SR 4.1.

I'd like to know, please.

Nicely done. Do tell. However, now really wondering how closely one could come to this effect in P4 with an animated wave morph and appropriate bump & reflection mapping... (Hey, - just looked again... OT, & I know it is a demo for the animated water effect, but the sequence might look really, REALLY cool if you could add a fluttering highlight on her body as though it were being reflected, up from below, off the water surface.)

It's more or less available if you put the right bits and pieces together. Little Dragon has an animated ripple map posted free somewhere and I have free water materials (not animated) similar to that over at Forbidden City with some info on P5 node based materials. People are always asking about water in P5 though, so the more info around about it, the better.

I know it's not the same but gives me an opportunity to ask more questions, and familiarize you with the math functions. (turn off skip frames and play, the preview in the material room should move) 4. Does anyone know how to determine the number of waves in MF1 and MF2 and the frequency in MF4 and MF5? (just dumb luck this works for 30 frames) My next post may be helped significantly by this next question. (21 MF nodes) 5.Can the nodes be renamed? 6. Any Questions? (for large waves the minimum displacement bounds may need to be increased)

Hmmm. Just a guess - but maybe a bump map generated by a math function involving sine & cos and driven by the frame number? (D*mn - can't remember the sine/cos formula for a circle - Sin squared + cos squared? Something like that.) Cheers, Diolma

Nice try Diolma thats R=sqrt(u^2+v^2) but I am still unsure about the frequency of the sine wave 2pie or 360? Caution: I do not try to push the math nodes over the edge and have not crashed Poser 5 SR4.1 yet, but things like dividing by zero and taking the square root of a negative number have always been very bad. [untested] (I did get very close to the log of zero (also not recommended) and Poser seemed to handle that just fine) Thanks for the lighting tip nance. I will work that into my next set of renders. (The water will create moving shadows if a light is raytraced through it [tested]). Timesaver tip: don't raytrace (refract or reflect) until you are ready. just transparency will work for initial placement.

"turn off skip frames and play, the preview in the material room should move" now THAT's something I've never even thought of trying! (That could save a LOT of time). Drat. I forgot about u and v being equivalent to x and y. (That formula I still remember). Btw - do you know what "u" and "v" stand for? I always think of "v" being "vertical" and "u" being ...errmm... "unvertical" (but at 90 degrees). But I have no idea why they are called that.. Cheers, Diolma

I'm pretty sure the trig nodes work on radians, so the cycle length would be 2pi. Where do u and v come from? It's just an alphabet thing. When 3D cartesian coordinates were invented, the three letters used were x, y and z. Then when mathematicians started to talk about transformations from one 3D space to another, they needed another set of three letters to describe the coordinates of the target space. x y z are the last three letters of the aphabet, so it sort of made sense to move back three places and choose u v w. Texture mapping is a transformation from 3D space to 2D space, so the third coord, w, is usally dropped and we just talk about mapping from xyz space to uv space. However, there are some 3D programs that actually map to 3D space and use a full uvw mapping - it's just rare because it's not that useful.

Thanks Ajax, but W not that useful? It may not be in our plain when we start but is when we are finished, and W is also the answer to the displacement equations. LOL :)

Logically w ought to represent how colour (or whatever other texturing parameter you choose) changes as you move away from the surface of the object. Your standard uv map is a 2D slice of 3D uvw space and that 2D slice is painted on the surface of the object, so what happens as you move w away from 0 is that you are also moving away from the surface of the object. Since most 3D apps only render the surface of the object (the exceptions being things like volumetric rendering), there's usually no need to know what the colour is like away from the surface and that's why w usually isn't used - combined with the fact that you'd need a three dimensional input to do it and uv(w) mapping is almost always associated with flat picture textures (such as jpeg images) where there's no third dimension information coming from the texture. Procedural textures are genuinely three dimensional, but they don't need a uvw mapping because they just use the identity mapping (xyz maps to xyz). For things like displacement mapping, the usual technique is to take the brightness of a point on the 2D texture and use that as an indicator of how much to move the surface of the model. The direction of movement is taken to be the surface normal at that point, so although displacement mapping looks like it should be related to the w coord, they're actually not related at all. Basically the w coord is only used when an object contains renderable volume and even then you would probably be better off using a procedural textures. That's what I meant about it not being very useful. Poser still doesn't do volumetric objects and even if it does in future, I doubt it will use the w coord. Wow, you shure have a lot of math nodes there. I suppose you have to for any sort of even vaguely decent equation. I'll guess you used displacement to hollow out the ground, though you might have used a deformer if the ground plane has enough mesh for it.

O.o looks complicated! And WAY COOL! Only part I perhaps am able to answer is the ground deformation of the cyclorame. I don't know IF that's the way you did it, but selecting a part of it with the grouping tool and assigning a material to that part COULD do the trick. It could also be done with a magnet, if the deformation you're referring to is the "hole" where your water plane is.

I was unable to get a deformer to make a hole that worked, so I created a shader template like this, and displaced it. The hardest part is getting Maya to sit on the displaced plain. Special note: If you get it right be sure to save the material, as a material, then you can apply it to anything you like. Ajax, I use Poser as a 4 dimensional representation (much like the real world), and if the alternate axis was X1,Y1 then for me Z1 must exist (useful), (I am unable to imagine a 2, or just 3 dimensional object [limited perception?]). but u,v,w works. (at least there is only 1 t??:) still no questions? Did anyone get it to work?

Sorry Ajax, I just read post 14 again, we are discussing two different things. The material I am using, is using only refract and reflect (in final renders), so is in essence independent(?) of any individual map. Right? (Poser 5 is amazing) But for the ground, yep, what you said.

Argh displacement. Of course. I still haven't really gotten used to all the cool things you can do with it. Thanks for reminding me :o)

Wow... this seem great... Is it possible to have the material pose file ?

I would ask the same as semidieu. This justs reminds me why I dropped out of maths at uni. 8P Catlin