Hi folks There's any way to render realistic water reflections in Poser? I've seen water renders in Vue or Bryce, and I'm mad for find a good tutorial ...hey, I told GOOD. Reflection and refraction tuts at DAZ give very bad result, and here at tuts zone there's another one but bad too. Poser6 with SR2 is finally able to render realistic water, o we need to wait a SR3?? (or SR4, SR5, SR6...)

Attached Link: http://www.xiberpix.com/SqirlzReflect.html

here is a fun free app that does water reflections. Sqirlz Water Relection Edited for correct url

Message edited on: 11/15/2005 08:53

I think it can do quite good reflections. The image shows a couple of primitives, (sorry about the awful colours, it's just to demonstrate the reflection) reflected in the ground plane. In both cases the ground has a slight bump applied using a fractal_sum node. The left hand image has no displacement, the right hand one a little bit using a turbulence node to give a kind of oily appearance. Displacement on its own does not affect the reflection, but when combined with bump you seem to get more marked effects.

With a bit of experimenting you could get quite convincing reflections in the water.

nickedshield: thanks. But this is a postwork utility, and Im trying to do it in Poser... besides it works very similar like Flamingo Pear's Flood Filter for Photoshop spedler: thanks. Looks like a variation of the tut here by fran_joel, but Ill try it looks nice

This one is done with one of the free water shaders from my shader pack in free stuff.

This one isn't the shader pack, but I could probably dig out the details if you're after something like this.

One more. I think this one is in the shader pack, but I'm not sure.

~bookmark~

REALLY #2 AND #3 ARE WHAT I'M SEARCHING FOR...

The one with the Dystopia City is incredible (the other also, but already have them in the free package you made ;-) )

The one with the Dystopia City is incredible (the other also, but already have them in the free package you made ;-) )

Ajax, that's a great render of the city scene, really excellent work, but your girl in the pool seems to have had her hips severely dislocated.

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mateo, that's called refraction. Try sticking a pencil in a glass of water and look at how the pencil looks broken at the surface point. The render is doubly confusing to look at because you're also seeing the reflection of her upper body at the same time and it gets hard to tell which part is her seen through the water and which part is her reflection. The one with the Dystopia city blocks was rendered in Poser 5 and they changed something in Poser 6 that stopped it looking right. I haven't managed to make a good replacement for it yet, but later on I'll post a screenshot of the nodes so you can get on the right track at least. It's an approach that really works best with a sky dome though.

bookmark Love your shader pack Ajax. Use the thing all of the time! Best Wishes, Rance

I got obsessed with this a while back and searched both Renderosity and Runtime DNA. I collected many people's screen captures of their 'recipes' for water. I ended up combing these ideas into one shader. Here is my recipe for water.

That water appear in this image I did. It's resized for the Forums, the full size is in my gallery, along with several other images that I did with differing water recipes.

just adding a nudity tag....

Oops, sorry, forgot!!!

Very cool looking settings but they're for Poser 5 I see. Poser 6 has extra information on the reflect, refract, turbulence and Glossy nodes and the preview image doesn't look at all like yours. The results are good though. Hardest part to do is matchthe colors you used I think.

Message edited on: 11/15/2005 21:54

OK, after spending most of the evening mucking about in P6, I eventually found that the key difference between P5 and P6 for this type of shader is in the raybias of the reflect node, so here's the landscape water shader as it should be constructed in P6. Pay particular attention to the raybias setting on the reflect node. The default setting will give you a really horrible effect, so you need to turn it up quite a lot. A skydome is used in this image to give the water something to reflect when it isn't reflecting buildings. If you don't want to use a skydome, then make a sky shader of some sort and plug it into the background input of the reflect node. One of the things to note about this shader is that it makes water which has a mixture of diffuse and reflective qualities. Unlike real water, this stuff has no refraction. I've set it up that way because when you see water in a landscape, you usually see it from a low angle, which means you get lots of reflection and no refraction. I.e. this shader is intended for landscapes - don't use it to fill bath tubs or drinking glasses because it will look silly.

Here's the full P6 render. Another thing to note is that this shader is built to be the right scale for Dystopia. You may need to make dramatic increases in the scale of the clouds and turbulence nodes and increase the level of displacement if you plan to use it with normal scale Poser person. The settings shown in the nodes are all in Poser Native Units, so if you plan to copy them exactly, you'll need to set your interface to Poser Native Units under the general preferences.

Attached Link: Poser 5 water tutorial at Crescent's site.

Here's a link to the information on how to make the Poser 5 shader shown in post 7. It's a bit outdated now, but the principles are still the same. It was originally written to answer a forum question, so it doesn't read like a real tute, but it covers the principles and walks you through the reasoning that goes into building a water shader.

Here's a thought for you. If you had a Simple Colour node, and fed that into all the Scale value inputs, you could alter them all just be changing the colour. White=1, black=0. Or am I totally wrong about how this works? Anyway, the starting values would be much larger, and you might use a dark grey for the Dystopia scene. Or a math node, Add would be OK, I suppose, and a numeric input is perhaps easier to use in other ways.

That's odd! I get the following with settings that, other than some color choices is identical to yours and there's no wavy water effect at all.

Mizrael, Is displacement enabled in your render setting? Do you have your interface set to use Poser Native Units? Has that prop you are using been scaled or is it at 100% size? AntoniaTiger, Good idea, but it won't work, at least not on the turbulence node. Those three scale inputs need an input value that varies across 3D space. If you're going to feed something into them, it usually needs to be a P node or a U or V node. It should work on the clouds node.

WOW, a lot of settings... Ill try them :)

Ajax, I did a bid of fiddling around with a turbulence node. It's weirds, and I guess I don't understand the math behind it. But it looks like the "x_scale" input doesn't change the size of the pattern, while "y_scale" and "z_scale" do. Well, that's my empirical result. It's certainly nothing like as simple as my original idea, but using a small value in the Turbulence node seems to be the key. Turbulence <--- Multiply <---- U_value ^ Scale Control Set y_scale to 0.01 and you'll see the result vary when the node controlling the scale gets changed. (This is going bu what's shown in the shader-tree, not the final render.) I can't help but think I'd cope better if the Poser manual was more informative.

Ah well I had thought I set my units' to Poser Native but they're set to Feet at the moment. Displacement is turned on. Here's my Screen cap of the previous settings posted to this thread and the results. You can see how the preview window still looks different from the original posters but the results at least look similar. The prop I'm using is the standard Ground Plane prop. Changing between Feet and Poser units doesn't change the fact that my preview windows still look hugely different than the preview windows shown here by you and the other previous settings posted.

Message edited on: 11/16/2005 16:03

AntoniaTiger, I agree about the manual. What I know about how those three scale inputs work, I only know because Stewer told me. Basically, the turbulence node is a fractal function that produces a number between 0 and 1 for each point in 3D space. You could write it like this: f(sx, sy, sz) where s is a scaling constant hidden from the view of the user. If you don't have anything feeding into the inputs for the scale parameters, then each coordinate value is multiplied by the scale shown in the respective parameter before the function is evaluated. For example if you have xscale=2, yscale=3, zscale=4 then the function will look like this: f(2sx, 3sy, 4sz) If you feed something into those scale parameters, it replaces the x, y or z value, so you get F(2inputA, 3inputB, 4inputC) (The 2, 3 and 4 are there because Im assuming we leave those three scale parameters set to those values. Notice the s disappears once you connect an input) If those inputs are constant values, such as the output of a simple color node, then the output of the turbulence node becomes a constant value i.e. its just one shade of grey across the whole of 3D space. If you only feed a constant value into one of the three inputs, then you only create uniformity in along that axis. For example, if you want turbulence that varies across the ground plane, but looks exactly the same no matter what height you are at, you could feed a constant value into the yscale input and get a function like this: F(2sx, 3inputB, 4sz) Mizrael, The node setup you are copying comes from Poser 5 and the one youve posted is from Poser 6, so thats why your preview looks different for that shader. Regarding the shader I posted, Im pretty sure the reason your preview window looks different to mine is just what unit Poser is set to use. 0.0009 feet is a lot smaller than 0.0009 NPUs. You could always try just turning up the displacement setting until you get a similar look in the preview.

Message edited on: 11/16/2005 17:55

Thanks... The manual gives these things a different name, "x_input" rather than "x_scale". From what you say, and thinking about what I tried, there may also be complications connected to the alignment of the object surface. Does the 2D node-output image in the Materials Room show the same 2D as the plane-object you're trying to work on? Anyway, it seems clear that even with an input such as "U_node", which is bounded to the 0-1 range, it's much bigger than the internally calculated "sx". Is there some way of scaling the node output? Or is this going to need a Python script to let a single control adjust everything in proportion?

From memory, I think the turbulence node works on local coordinates. If you use P nodes to drive it then it will work on global coordinates. If you use U/V nodes then it will work on the object's UV mapping - so yes there can be issues with alignment of an object's surface, depending on how you set it up. I've never been able to figure out exactly what the 2D node preview shows. For the tubulence node it appeas to be parallel to the y axis but somewhere between the x and z (45 degrees maybe?). Typing values into the three scale parameters should scale the node output. You could also multiply each of your inputs by a single thing and then feed the three multiplied results into the input sockets. AFAIK there is currently no way to set up single parameter scaling for the turbulence node in local coordinates (you can do it with global or UV coords). Before P6 I tried to get in touch with somebody from CL to talk them about this sort of issue and ask for more global/local coord options, but it didn't pan out. I have no idea how to get those guys to talk to me :-( All of this stuff you and I have been discussing is intimately related to animated turbulence. We're getting away from the original topic of the thread a bit. Maybe we should start a new one and I should post some node set-up images.

I on;y had the idea because of the metion of the Dystopia sets being to a different scale from Poser people... As it is, I wonder if turbulence is worth using for some jobs. With Poser using a bought-in render engine so they can get the precedural shaders, I sometimes wonder if anyone on the Poser side of the deal knows what some of these nodes really do. And the web searches I've done seem to lead to a lot of dead links...

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/viewed.ez?galleryid=989727

This is the best water I got straight out of Poser. Not a real tutorial, but I wrote down how I did it.

Thanks for all the tips and tricks folks!