Let me start off saying that Carrara is my favorite 3D app to work in. But it dose have it's short comings. I don't have the time unfortunately to figure everything on my own. But what I have figured is that for landscapes Carrara seems to fall short. Specially on the sky. But my question to any Carrara expert is: Is it possible to achieve this level of realism creating water in Carrara? I modeled the flying craft in the Virtex modeler. I am getting quite conformable with it now. It only took like 30 minutes. I am working on a better texture. The background was created in Terragen. I used GI to render this version.

Message edited on: 07/25/2004 11:34

I've had some success in creating procedural water within carrara, I'm a little busy right now, but when I get a minute I'll post a screen of a decent texture.

I had a little time this morning and I am working on it. But your help would be more than welcome. Thanks goofball.

Carrara is pretty good at water. Turbulence is a good modifier (used in the Bump channel in the top image) and, if you've got Shader Ops, the Fake Fresnel works well to give the varied transparency as in the bottom image.

I think the real trick with terrains in Carrara is that you need lots and lots and lots of polygons. I made the included image by turning Rendered Mesh Density to 4096x4096 and turning off smooth normals. In Edit, I set the image size to 1024x1024, generated great peaks and applied the Erode 2 filter. You could probably achieve better results than this by messing around with erosion and other filters.

Okay try this, its not as fine tuned as I would like, but I'm out of time and this should be a good starting point for you. BTW, my color was set to zero, everything else you can see here. Hope this works for you!

falconperigot: I don't have Shader Ops yet. I will get the Power Pack as soon as I can afford it. Your bottom image is excellent, good job. I am coming very close to something that looks like your top image, except I applied it to a modified terrain that simulates weave on water. But I am still not entirely pleased with the results. Have you seen Brian Taylor's work. Now that is some very convincing water, and he animates it somehow. I know he is using Carrara or Infini-D, how he dose it is beyond me.

Eagle 2358 I have kind of explored terrain editor some with mixed results. I have also a bit of experience with Bryce and they are kind of similar. You get a bit more control in Bryce but Carraras is OK. I need to get better with the Texture Room and learn more stuff their. So far I am just using Terragen since it is very easy to get impressive results with very little effort. But you don't get the flexibility of having everything in one place.

Cool thanks goofball.