Does anyone know where I can get a prop or brushes of realistic water?  And if there are brushes for CS2, is there a way to angle it in any way you want?  Right now I'm using Flaming Pear's FLOOD which is a good plug-in for PS CS 2 but there is no way to angle it.  It just goes to one angle unless I'm doing something wrong with it.  Thanks in advance.
Adrian

I made some water surface props with waves a while back. Give me some time and I'll hunt them down and put them up for download. I made them with height maps from Bryce terrains which I then exported and imported into Poser and saved as pp2's.

There's all kinds of "water" - can you be more specific? Water in a glass? Water beads on skin?

Or are you talking about environmental water surfaces, like pond, lake, river, ocean, surf?

I know a thing or two about doing those entirely in the poser material room, if that's what you're into. The collage above shows a bunch of different shaders. Every one of them was a procedural shader made in the material room, applied to a one-sided square. Most of these shaders have been posted here or at www.RuntimeDNA.com

If you search either place for "bagginsbill" and "water" you'll find lots of info.

 

It depends of what Poser and what computer you have. A good option is RDNA Microcosm, there are two water expansion packs very impressive (lakes, seas...)

Well I have a very fast computer with a very good video card so all the suggestions above are good options.  I'm going to post a picture so you can see what I mean.  This picture I'm posting is scary for Halloween.  But if you look at the water, which I made with Flaming Pear, it only goes one way.  The picture also shows what I'm looking for in terms of turning it in different angles.  Thanks. Adrian

Excellent scary picture!!! That ghoulish dude is textured really well.

I don't really understand what you mean by "only goes one way". The water in that render looks very good, but for one minor detail, which is that the reflections are too bright. Real water doesn't reflect 100% like a mirror does. But the distortions due to the wavelets looks very good.

Could you post a render where it is not good so I can understand the problem about the angles?

bagginsbill
I guess what I'm trying to say is if I render a picture and then I want to add the water to it, I can only pose the characters one way, because if I move them around and then try to put the water into the scene, I can't change the angle to match the picture.  If you notice in the above picture, the waves can only be in that angle (Horizontially).  For example I want to make a picture that pans towords the water more as opposed to be horizontial.  I can't change the angle such as moving it left to right or up and down.  I hope that makes sense. 
Adrian

I think he's basically looking for a good tutorial or ready made water prop, since he's currently creating the water effect with postwork, and that's why it won't look good from different angles.

Well for a scene such as yours, we can go pretty simple.

Add a one-sided square (found in Poser Props - Primitives) to your scene. Set the xRotate to -90 degrees so it is laying down flat - parallel to the ground plane. Scale it up and position it where you want the surface of the water to be. In this scene, I scaled it to 1700%.

Go into the Material room. Select the one-sided square.

Under these lighting conditions, there would be no light coming from beneath the water, so all we want are reflections. So set the Diffuse_Value to 0.

If you were to have a light that points toward the water in the direction of the camera, you'd want some sharp specular reflections of that light. So I set the Specular_Value very high (2) and the Highlight_Size to .001 for a sharp highlight. But with the light pointing away from the camera as seen here, this doesn't really matter.

Add a Reflect node plugged into the Reflection_Color input of the surface. Set the Reflection_Value to .5. You can adjust this to your taste for how strong you want the reflection to be, but it should not be 1 as this is unrealistic. Make sure that Reflection_Lite_Mult and Reflection_Kd_Mult are both turned off. This node will make the water square reflect the other objects in the scene.

If you're using a background image on the Poser "Background", don't! The Poser Background shader does not participate in rendering the 3D scene. It just controls the initial value of your "paper" before drawing the scene on top of it. If you need a background, add another one-sided square and attach the background image to that square. Scale it up and position it behind your figures. Then it will show up directly visible in the render behind the figures, as well as in the reflections of the water.

I can't emphasize this enough - when Poser calculates reflections, if the "ray" in the ray-tracer doesn't hit anything, then the Reflect node will just use the Reflect:Background color which is not going to look very interesting.

To get the little ripples in the water, we need to use either a bump or a displacement. For relatively calm water like this, I use the bump. The reason is that Poser has some bugs regarding reflections on a displaced surface. There are some complicated workarounds and it's worth doing if you need big waves, like ocean water. But for this scene, the bump input will work just fine.

There are many different nodes we could plug in, to get different shapes on the water. Turbulence would be good if you want the water to look like it's churning and roiling. But for calm ripples, I like the clouds node. Set the Sky_Color to black and the Cloud_Color to white. Change the scale to .4. Change Complexity to 2. Enable Global_Coordinates. Change the Noise_Type to Improved. 

By using Global_Coordinates, we guarantee that the size of the ripples will stay the same even if you resize the one-sided square. If you want the ripples to be wider, increase the Clouds Scale. For smaller ripples, decrease the Clouds Scale.

Once the ripples are set up, the surface will reflect scene elements that are not visible from the camera's point of view. In my setup, I had a sky dome (a giant sphere) surrounding the figure, and it had light blue coloring. As a result, you see some light blue in the water. If you use a sky dome, you should pay attention to the color of the dome because you're going to see it in the water. I left mine bright blue so you can see it clearly in my render, but I'd change it to match the dark blue of the background picture I used here.

If you do not use a sky dome, the reflection rays will hit nothing and you'll get black reflections. You can change the "hit nothing" value by setting the Background color in the Reflect node. But I don't recommend that for realism. Use a real sky dome with gradient coloring instead.

The numeric value on the Bump input controls how "tall" the ripples are. My Poser display units are in inches, so that .2 value is .2 inches. If you are using Feet or something else, then .2 would be .2 feet and would not work. I suggest you change your Poser display units to inches, then enter the .2 value .2. If you want, after that you can change your Poser display units back to the original value. Poser will then show you the .2 converted into the new units.

In your Render Settings, make sure you have Raytracing enabled, and Raytrace bounces should be at least 1. If the water is going to reflect an object which itself is reflective, then the bounces need to be at least 2. I don't see any shiny metal in your scene so that doesn't matter, but remember that for future use.

If you have trouble with any of this, come back and ask for more help.

Don't forget to show us the results! Looking forward to it.

Bagginsbill  
Thank you so much!  Wow what an awesome Tut.  I will try this and let you know what happens.  Thanks again.
Adrian

So what happened? :)

Yay bookmarked lol

Bagginsbill
Sorry about the delay in responding to your post.  I couldn't get it to work correctly but it's something that I'm doing wrong.  Every time I try to do the settings you suggested, it didn't look like water at all.  I will keep trying and see if I'm doing something wrong.
Adrian

When I can't get the right effect from Flood, I use RDNA's Microcosm. Since it uses a plane with mats and bumps for water effects you can probably get what you want in a good effect. The image shows one effect where the water ripples out from all around the figure, which is what I was going for and is impossible to achieve with Flood.

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=1324486

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=1325133

I was trying to get the darn water in the pool right, still not happy with it, but best I can do until I can fiddle some more. I ended up taking everything into Carrara, using shaders there, because that water just didn't want to know. IMO it's too light, but that might just be me. It does reflect the (Carrara) sky and I used Global Illumination and an additional light there, with a bunch of haze thrown in for good measure (was trying to "soften" it.)

The image contains nudity, so I'm not putting it in here, just the link to it.

Hmm... I'm going to have to install Bryce 6 I think and play with it some, and see if I can get it to pull Poser 6 across.

Silke,

That pool water needs refraction. It won't look real without it. From that viewing angle, the light gets bent severely as it goes from water to air, making the underwater contents appear less tall and closer to the surface.

In the absence of refraction, those figures look like they're standing in a visible gas or cloud.

Anyway to use some kind of anything to fake a waterhose (dripping / flushing) in poser? or a squirting p-something or something like that?? Hmmm? cant figure that out... Any suggestions appreciated, if i cant use it (whatever) in Poser i have a lot of other apps i can integrate a poser animation in, which i can use. Please anyone?

You gotta use your imagination a bit. The material room will let you turn any prop into a watery thing. Here in this picture, the water out of the faucet is just a Poser cylinder. The ripples (2) are each a Poser torus. All have the water shader applied, same as the water in the tub. Using the shader Displacement channel and proper use of reflection and refraction will go a long way to realism.

Quote - You gotta use your imagination a bit. The material room will let you turn any prop into a watery thing...

Eh... Sorry, i missed the real important thing.... It should be used in an animation :-/ sorry The waterwhatever has to be "animatable" is that possible??? Nice pic and thank you for the tip :-) Im REALLY new to Poser and 3d overall, but amazed... REALLY amazed. I think perhaps the fantasy and imagination will appear sometime ;-> Thanks a lot!

Bagginsbill
OH man I wish you could teach me how to make water like you do, that is wonderful!!  Thanks for your help.  I can't get nothing to work.
Adrian

Bagginsbill,
Yeah I know, it was a real... umm yes. Nightmare. :)
I didn't have time to render it in high settings either, and on top of it I am totally useless in Carrara still (those shaders baffle me completely :P) and I can't get it looking even half way decent in Poser.
Gonna see if I can put more refraction on that. But I think it'll be a case of ditching the prop completely and starting over. :)

regarding the carrara image of the white pool with the two folks lip-locked - it's very good IMVHO. I recall litst or ringo explaining many years ago that one gets glowing water like that if the sum of diffuse colour and some other property adds up to more than 100%. so maybe one would turn the water colour to black or something. p.s. bill's bathtub image is very good as well. it shows that the right person can do excellent renders in poser, and that bad renders are due to user error, in most cases.

I'm re-rendering the pool at the moment, having added a terrain to give the water some movement (Thanks Baggins :) Your pic gave me the idea.) but alas, it's no longer transparent.
I'm guessing because it's 2 layers now, but on the other hand... I kinda like it better that way.
I haven't uploaded it yet (it's still rendering.) but I will for comparison sake when it's done. :)