On several renders here and in the gallery, I notice that when people or objects are standing in or sitcking out of the water that there is an unrealistic border between the object and the water. The water usually has a nice texture / bump to it simulating a bit of turbulence or small waves but there is rarely any disturbance of that effect at the point where the water touches the object. I know that doing this accurately could be difficult, but I'm wondering if anyone has any tips on generating this effect...

Sort of like this?

If you are real good you can paint this type of effext in by hand using the blur brush in photoshop and the doge and burn tools. Or as I did in this inage, I applied a KPY filter called turbulence. You need to do it in the actual image layer though, this will not work on a added layer. You mask out the object you wish to have the disturbance around. Then you go into KPT plugs and select the turbulence plug in. Set the dampening half way. The brush size to the smallest setting and distortion above the half way mark. You may need to experiment with the settings a bit. Then you drag your mouse across the object near the water line. Try varying directions or move your mouse in a circular motion and see how the ripples expand. The trick is that you need to hold your other hand over the enter key on the keyboard. When you think the ripple pattern is the way you want it hit enter this will freeze the effect and apply it to your image. In the preview the entire object will be distorted but don't worry the main image will not have the distortion applied to the area you masked in step one. To touch up use the smooth and blur tools to tidy up the ripples. This is a trial and error way of doing it but it is easy and quick enough to get good results in short order. You may even wish to experiment with multiple passes. This technique can also creat realistic bump and ripple texture maps. Convert a ripple image to gray scale and import it into the terrain editor can create your own ripple and wave objects.

I believe there is also a tutorial out there on how to do splash effects using terrian latice work. Takes time and some boolean work, but it can be done.

attached is a example of a KPT turbulence image that can be used as a bump or a terrain map for bryce.

With some smoothing and lowering here is the result in bryce.

Just for our understanding (we are a little bit new in this topic, got our Bryce 4 three weeks ago): - first you create a 2D image with water-swirls/turbulences in any painting program (like photoshop) - Then import this image into Bryce as texturemap - Bryce is transforming this texture into a 3D-surface??? Please tell us, how to convert an image to a texturemap or get this result, which is shown above. We for ourself, had choosen a (perhaps very cryptical) way to creat waves in a rough sea: In RDS we build our sea, based on a flat surface with 50 facets in x and y. We did the modelling and at the end we got our rough sea as *.obj and imported it into Bryce. Greetings Matthias + Daniel

You open the terrain creator / editor in bryce and click on the picture tab. Load your grayscale image into the box and apply. Then use the smoothing and other tools to get your ripples the way you like when finished click ok on the terrain editor and your new texture will be in the window like the frame above.

You will need to use the smooth and lower options in the editor to remove the spikyness and get the height of the terrain from a block like you see here to the flat ripple terrain you see in the picture above.

A great site to get tutorials on how to better use the Terrain editor and bryce is http://www.brycetech.com There you will find tutorials covering in depth the functionality of most of bryce's tools and functions. I hope that this short example helps you move in the right direction.

In this frame you can see the location of the LOwer ans smoothing controls to get your Map to resemble a smoth flat water mesh.

Have a look at www.petersharpe.com for the watersplashes tutorial, see if that's any good for you. Actually a whole bunch of good tutes there :)

In addition to all the above metioned ideas, try some alpha-channel driven specularity and/or reflection on the surface of the object and position it so that it corresponds to the water/object intersection point/line, giving and effect of wetness ect, also have your objects texture customized in respect to colour so it appears "wet"....The real world Bryce2 (and probably the lastest addition also) book also has some good ideas to offer on this subject...

Thanks to everyone for the tips! I'm using both techniques and just need to do a bit more tweaking... Great advice! Thanks!