Have you tried a noise node? Also, remember that you can insert a Color_Math node between the displacement node and channel to set your zero displacement value to something other than black. Example - set the Color_math Value 2 to RGB 128/128/128 (medium gray), and anything lighter will displace outwards, anything darker will displace inwards. Plug your noise displacement into the Color_Math, then plug the C_M into the disp channel. Since a noise node gives very mixed tone values, the Color_math node can change it dramatically. mac

I'd suggest trying to work out something procedural, rather than using a texture map... it would stop the pixellation you get from magnification, and would be easier on the memory overheads when rendering... exactly which nodes you might want to use, though, I'll have to sit back and think for a while... jonthecelt

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/viewed.ez?galleryid=1187424

Bagginsbill - that looks great! What noise settings did you have and how do I feed the cellular into it?

Bagginsbill - oh and where were you when I was asking how do that kind of water effect? Mind sharing your secret? ;)

Bagginsbill! Holy manure not only the sand but the foam!!! I bow to the god of procedural nodes and pray that a post, with screen shots, appears before me on how to do that and foam. Oh, and the water too. LOL

Message edited on: 03/30/2006 20:02

We're not worthy, Bagginsbill! :)

I'm also interested in the water settings, Bagginsbill. Please post them.

LOL - sorry I didn't answer - was busy watching TV. I'll post the material room settings for the water and sand tomorrow. But the short answer is I used a math node to add them together the cellular and noise together. Sometimes you feed one node to another, sometimes you just add'em up. DrMCClark - I remember seeing your question about the water effect a while back. That post got me thinking about it and led to the picture. But the search engine is such crap I couldn't find your post to tell you about it. But now we've found each other so all is good. PabloS, you crack me up. Cya in the morning.

sure bagginsbill. we know gods need R&R. :-)

Message edited on: 03/30/2006 23:49

bagginsbill, you're my procedural Guru. Settings, please :)

This type of post only lets me know fow much further I need to go with poser and how little I know. I'm still using 2D texture maps, and playing around with transparency and specular settings, and the use of nodes and all their intracicies astounds me. Just how do you people learn so much about 3D programing? Do you do this for a living? I'm a teacher in Australia working from 6:30 to 3:30 and use Poser as a hobby for maybe 2-3 hours a day. Do I have any hope of mastering the techniques you are talking about? I've been using Poser 4&5 for the past 2 years but, reading this, now I'm feeling I don't really know much at all. I think I need some quick, clear Node work. Any tutorials?

oops, found just what I'm looking for posted by Acadia yesterday (or today in your time).

Here's my basic scene setup in the preview. One sided square for water, MicroCosm Macro for sand, hi-res sphere for sky.

The MicroCosm Sky Dome didn't show up in reflections, so I use the sphere instead. Here I've shown the Transform for the Sky sphere.

The white oval is the sand, the gray square is the water. You can just make out the sky sphere as a lighter large oval over the whole scene. I make the bottom half of the sphere transparent, which make the preview ghosted like this. Until you set the material, it will show up opaque.

In the upper right is the fBm and math function to generate the foam structure. This is passed through a math function only so I can easily turn it off without disconnecting it. I just set the math value to 0. The fBm produces white where I want foam. This is fed to the diffuse_value, so where there is no foam, the square produces no diffuse light.

To the left of the fBm is a math function which "inverts" the foam map. This becomes my clear water map. In other words, where the water is clear, this is white. Where the foam is, this is black. I feed this to the specular value, because I don't want specular reflections on the foam - just the water. I also feed this to the reflection and refraction values. Again, I only want those effects on the water, not the foam.

The reflect node is straightforward. You can adjust the value (.2) up or down to suit your taste. Don't make it too high or the water won't look real.

I've done a coupld tricks on the refract node. First, I set the softness to .5 - this makes the water a little murky. You can set it to 0 for crystal clear water. But surf always has some sand and bubbles in it and this takes care of it. Second, I set the RayBias to 1 inch. This means that any object within an inch of the surface will not be "seen" by the refraction. Or something like that. Anyway, it is this value that makes the edge of the water look white where it comes in close contact with the sand. I set the Refract background color to white and this makes the nice foamy edge on the water. Pretty cool, huh? Its actually a bug that I turned into a feature.

The v texture coordinate of the square drives the blender which chooses what color to tint the water. I used aqua and very light gray. Play with other colors here. Please realize, this is a trick and I have carefully contrived my scene to let this work. If the camera was seeing a curve around the water, it won't look right. I think of ways to deal with that, but for now, just make the sand-water interface roughly aligned with the X axis and all will be copacetic.

Finally, the Displacement is a combination of a Fractal_Sum and the Foam. You can try other functions instead of Fractal_Sum, like Turbulence, Waves, Spots, etc. Lots of different effects are possible.

To get good specular glints off the water, you need to either have some pretty violent displacement or, as I have done in my picture, put the sun back enough so it shines somewhat towards the camera.

On the issue of those spots in the sand. First of all, I don't bother with AO in a scene like this. There is only a tiny amount of IBL - most of the light should come from a single infinite light. So ambient shadows are largely irrelevent. Second, even with AO off, there is still a shadow bias problem with surfaces displaced by the cellular node. Try raising the shadow min bias on your infinite light (the one simulating the sun). Mine was set to 2. Below 1, I get the same artifacts as you did, even without AO.

Oh bagginsbill who art in procedural node heaven .... Super stuff! I was thinking the water/foam node would also be useful for hot tub. bath tub scenes, etc. I'm not sure I understand how you control where the foam appears. Does it come into play when a surface below the water plane is within the RayBias?

Ashley9803 - I wish I did this for a living. But I am a software engineer and messing with shader nodes is just like using a programming language, so figuring out how to do math and assemble pieces to do specific things is just like writing software. Which I am good at :) However, to do well, you also have to know what light is doing. I have studied physics (in high school I got a perfect score on the physics SAT) a lot, especially the physics of light. So if you really want to do well with tricky stuff, learn how light works. I don't mean physics, per se, though that helps. But understanding diffuse, specular, refraction, reflection, these are the basics. Then you have to get really familiar with all the shortcuts and approximations that Poser makes and learn to work around them when they mess up your scene. After that, drag and drop :-) Oh, and a HUGE, HUUUGE, amount of time spent experimenting.

PabloS - there are two different foam effects here. One is from the ray bias - this is making the foam at the water's edge where it touches the sand. I think it only happens when the underlying surface is at a very small angle to the water. The other foam is from the fBm node. In post 23, I turned that off, so you can see only raybias foam in that render. You don't have to use the fBm node. You could actually draw the foam and use an image mask instead. Hmmm, give me a minute and I'll demo that.

oooo! Thanks!

Making structured foam out of the same material turned out to be difficult to get the edges right.

So I made a second square, took out all the foam from the water, added the foam logic to the other square. The foam square I placed a teeny bit under the water square, with the foam sticking up through the water. I used an image to define the foam area and made the rest of the foam square transparent.

Will post the materials used next.

Thank you, O wise one, for sharing your knowledge so generously. I always enjoy reading and then playing with the ideas you show us.

Excellent info, thanks.

Whoa! Great! This will indeed be useful!

the end of my physics studies came abruptly after realizing that I could not get my brain "in that place." The prof started with "imagine you're looking out a window and someone tosses a ball outside the window in an arc. How long will you see the ball...?" Then went into a tedious explanation of vectors. And my brain was screaming, "why don't you just use a stopwatch!?!"

Anyway, thanks a bunch my friend for giving us the "stopwatch" and making things understandable for those of us that are unenlightened in the ways of physics.

oooo! Just thinking out load here. What if I drape a cloth over a character applying a varient of this node. Could I get the effect of the foam with a bit of water, washing over the character? Or perhaps the character texture itself using an image mask? Hmmmm....

Message edited on: 03/31/2006 15:31

bookmark

It's this way. I'm inept at visualizing or anticipating what will happen in the material room. Needless to say, my "experiment" in applying that node to a figure resulted in new levels of wrongness.

I only post this so that anyone waiting in eager anticipation of seeing my results can go about their day.

If bagginsbill is the procedural node god, then I am ... well not the anti-god, but more like a premordial amoeba.

Message edited on: 03/31/2006 18:34

priceless info!! bm

winces Ouch..that sure looks like a painful beach to sun-bake on ? :)

Great Tut. Love this. That surf is incredible. Anton AKmaterialroombookmark

bagginsbill, can I make a temple for to adore you? (full of nude priestesses) :P THANKS !!! :D

This looks like an excellent thread. I'm heading to bed but I'll look at it when I'm more awake.

Wouldn't it be nice if someone at R'osity were collecting tutorial information like that and putting it, indexed, in a central location? I mean, all I have to do is bookmark it, but that's because thanks to wandering into another thread, I know about it.

Search engines on forums are generally crap. I spent more than an hour, a few weeks ago, tracking down a brilliant workshop thread on fur at RDNA. They have announced a "tutorial archive" that may make the search easier. But I'm not suggesting a "tutorial archive." I'm suggesting an archive of major informational threads, like this one. I will find a dozen uses for the knowledge gained from reading it.

M

Message edited on: 04/01/2006 07:30

DrMcClark - I very carefully wrote in my first post a ke piece of info. Then renderosity ate my first posting and I had to type it all in again. (It always does this if you try to reply too long after having retrieved a thread.) I should know better, but I forgot to copy my text. So when I retyped it, I left something out. MY UNITS ARE INCHES If your units are not set to inches, and you use my displacement, bump, or other "size" related numbers, it will not work. I know its not the default, but when I'm visualizing what I want for new nodes, I think better in inches. For example, sand dunes 2 inches high or whatever. So go to Edit/General Preferences, find the tab with units on it, and choose Inches. After you've entered my materials, you can go back to feet or whatever - it won't change the mats. Instead the numbers will show up in the new units.

I agree about a "great thread" repository. Acadia makes her own, and so do I.

Bagginsbill - Ah, yes. 2 inches is rather different than 2 feet ;) And yes, having a repository of superb tutorial threads like this is a fabulous idea.

Bagginsbill

could you give some more detail on 2 things related to this please?

1. shadows on water - what are the main nodes that we need to sort out - on most of my renders the shadow (say of a palm tree) treats the water as just another plane - I ve tried altering shadow bias settings to make the shadows more fuzzy but it still looks way off

2)if doing an animation of waves on a beach would you animate procedurally? or maths function maybe between 2 images if that were possible?

Message edited on: 04/03/2006 09:12

As seen in my post #29, shadows from things above the water (like trees or foam) actually show up on the BOTTOM, not the water itself. If you turn off cast shadows for the water plane, then the only shadows on the bottom will be from other things.

A shadow falling on the water should have NO effect on the surface reflections. So this is why you should make sure that the base material has "Reflection_Light_Mult" and "Reflection_Kd_Mult" turned off. Otherwise, Poser multiplies how much to reflect by how much light is hitting that spot, which has nothing to do with reality.

Now if you want to model murky water, then we have a problem. Nothing in the model for water (reflect, refract, or specular) is going to properly render the effect of light and shadow on particles SUSPENDED in the water, between the surface and the bottom.

In the picture above, I tried another technique to address this. I placed 8 squares between the water surface and the bottom. On each of these, I connected a "random" node to a bias node (bias .1) and then that to the transparency inputs of the material. This creates random speckles that interact with light. But most of these squares is transparent. I layered this more or less evenly between the surface and the bottom. The color on them was just ordinary diffuse greenish brown. The result is that each of these catches some of the light or shadow, and lets the rest through to the next layer. As a result, the bottom is indistinct and the shadow from the tree fades nicely as the light finds it harder and harder to reach the bottom.

I think this is pretty realistic.

if you're not a god, then may I suggest "procedural node savant"? That's just amazing

I don't even try animation, so I can't say from experience what would work best. Based on how many cheats and approximations I'm making, I'd guess that animation wouldn't work too well. For example, getting the surf to flow, spread, and generally act real seems pretty hard to me. I could imagine using the "wave" node to get real wavy motions to propogate, but it would be a lot of work to get them to flow properly. PabloS - stop making my head swell. :)

I tried out your tutorial, but nothing seemed to work, until I realised that you were using inches in your preferences where I was using millimeters. :blushing: But I think that happens all the times, Eurospace lost a 150 million marslander by that mistake. Great tutorial by the way.