I've got Ajax's free raytraced water texture, and I'm working on a scene that uses a mirror. The water looks fine in the actual pool, but it's got this funky purple color in the reflection (it's the same color that is the "background" color on the refract node that is plugged into the refraction_color).

I've tried playing around with the settings on the water, I've tried moving the lights and camera, I even bumped up the "raytrace bounces" setting for the render all the way to 64, thinking that might be the problem (since the water uses raytracing and the mirror does for the reflection), and I can't seem to get it to change.

Any ideas?

Silly question :) did you change the refraction color? John.

it's the same color that is the "background" color on the refract node that is plugged into the refraction_color Change that to the color your background really has.

Fugazi, Yeah--whatever I change the refraction color to, that's the color I see for the water in the reflection. Stewer, Let me give that a try, and see how it works. thanks!

I have a couple of water materials, the background colour on the reflect node is a nearly black shade of blue.

Stewer, Changing the background color to the color of the background (whoda thunk it?) makes a big difference. I'm going to tweak it some, and see if I can get it a little more "transparent", but if I can't, at least I've got something I can work with. Thanks!

The reason I left it that colour was to be a kind of alarm bell. When you see pink, you're supposed to go "hey, something's wrong". In this case, what's wrong is that there's nothing for the water to reflect - no sky, no roof, nada.

If you check the readme for the shader pack, you'll see a list of ways you can handle the problem. Changing the background colour to something less obtrusive is one of them, but the best thing would be to include a sky dome or some other sort of enclosed prop in your scene so the water has somethig it can reflect. You can also feed a spherical environment map (ie a reflection map) into the background channel. All you need is a reflection map that looks like the sky.

Message edited on: 01/29/2005 17:13

Ajax, Having it that color certainly worked as an alarm :-) I never thought about no "ceiling" being a problem, since every other time I used it, I had a ceiling. It looks like I need to spend some time with the readme file. Thanks for the help--it's my favorite water to use.

Glad you like it :-)