Greetings Posers!

I am trying to create a scene in the bottom of a pool of water.
I have set up my characters and did the nice tile background and floor of the pool. I rendered it but can not get that "Caustic" effect caused by light flowing through surface water ripples.
I placed a ripple image above the scene and out if camera view and shined a bluish spot through it down onto the subjects but still no ripple shadows. I varied the transparency of the ripple tex and cranked the shadow up to max on the spot light. Still nothing.
What am I doing wrong?

BTW I am using Poser 4. I have done similar shadow effects but never with water so this is kinda new and i am flummoxed as to why it is not working.

I thought I could make a b&W version of the texture with a trans map so it will cast a stronger shadow but not sure if this is a good solution and if not don't want to do all that work (I am a bit slow with that stuff) to do it if it's not going to work. Any help would be appreciated but the "Pros" here!
:)

8/26/08

shante:

Could you place a one-sided-square under your water, but above the tiles, apply a caustic texture to the square, and make it partially transparent?

LMK

Maybe I didn't explain. I want the shadows to flow over the characters so that it gives the appearance of being under water. I have lit and/or textured all the elements I could a shade of blue similar to the color under water in a pool and plaved bubble in the appropriate places. But without the shadows cast by the caustic ripples on the surface and in the gently swirling water it looks fake. I hate fake!  :)

I also used Atmosphere to fade what we see in the distance.

Hi BagginsBill.
Sounds doable but I don't have Poser 5 or 6 or 7 to work with. I am using Poser 4x (for now!)
So I gotta take long work-around steps to get something close to what you are referring to above.

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php?message_id=2741994&ebot_calc_page#message_2741994

Quote - Hi BagginsBill.
Sounds doable but I don't have Poser 5 or 6 or 7 to work with. I am using Poser 4x (for now!)
So I gotta take long work-around steps to get something close to what you are referring to above.

Poser 4. Oh. I totally missed that.

Uh - why are you still using Poser 4. Wasn't Poser 5 like free in a magazine CD or something?

has to do with processor and old boxes. I am on an older Mac and not yet ready to migrate over. I have Poser 5 and 6 and 7 all legally purchased but getting my computer ready to install new software means new op system and I loathe that kind of upkeep. Since I lost my job 18 months ago!, I have not had the mind set or the money to make the necessary re-configs.
Poser eases that stupid pain but trying to upgrade would prove my undoing just from the sheer mind warping the process would incur.  :(

Sorry to hear that.

So I've never seen P4. Can you attach an image to a light? If so, it should be possible to use a ripple image showing what color light to generate and project that. You'd have to make it have the blue/white pattern already to start with. If you don't have a way to do that, I can probably make such an image.

Well, I hav ecreated shadows shining spots through grids or other opague shadow creating objects including B& w textures on flat planes (as in image of leaves in pure black & white w/o midtones on a flat plane prop). I thought this would work the same way but for the life of me I can not figure out why it refuses to cast the ripple shadows.

I'm sorry, I know this is a serious thread, but I keep seeing the subject line and thinking "Reflections in poo!"

I apologize.
http://www.roflcat.com/i-are-serious-cat-this-is-serious-thread.php

That's an interesting shader :)  I think you might want to polish it a little bit - awkward task I suppose - and maybe take it to the next level:
http://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php?message_id=3072049&ebot_calc_page#message_3072049

the corn is a pro touch.

What I have always despised is a senseless Thread Grinch!
You apologize but it mens nothing in the greater scheme of things.
A response comes next which also has nothing to do with the original thread.   So, thus, a "Serious" thread of any kind goes to TURD in a hurry. Oh, how I hate people like you so damn much! You seem to prevail in this community. Spewing BS and extending otherwise serious threads so much the original context is obliterated with collective dribble. Makes one sick!
Why don't you go play in someone else's sand box, or should I say "THREAD" and bring your stupid cats, a and senseless humor and you dog turds else where!

What pisses me off more is that I will probably get baned for my angry response when it is people like you who should get thrown out of here.

Well I strongly doubt you'll get banned.  I am genuinely sorry for disrupting your thread.

Wolf you old Dog. Good to hear from you. Hope all is swell.
I thought of that but what I need is the shadows from the surface dropping down onto the subjects beneath. The only way to do that is faking the caustics from the surface. A member over at Seventh Complex was kind enough to create a few simulation caustic textures for me to apply to a surface plane and shine light down through to hopefully simulate this.
I will post it if it does.
Thanks all.

Im doing good  up here in jersey
imsure you will  get this caustic effect hacked out

I just spent all Day in V4 HELL trying to render some
60 second animations for a new client
..... I will fill you in later

-Wolf_

jersey?  i though you lived in Cali?

there's a free app out there that basically does what bb's node does.   it generates caustic tiles with various parameters.   can be useful as a light gel, or combining with a texture.  you probably won't need it f your friend is helping, but just in case:

http://www.lysator.liu.se/~kand/caustics/

I'm going to say again, since I didn't get an answer.

*So I've never seen P4. Can you attach an image to a light? If so, it should be possible to use a ripple image showing what color light to generate and project that. You'd have to make it have the blue/white pattern already to start with. If you don't have a way to do that, I can probably make such an image.

Cobaltdream has given a source of such images, so if you can attach an image to a light (a "gel") then it should work.

Failing that, you could use a plane to let like leak through only in the pattern of the caustics. You'd attach the pattern to the Transparency (I'm assuming P4 has transparency.) You need to make sure that this image is INVERSE, i.e. it should be black where a caustic should be, because in a transmap, black means transparent, white means opaque.

If P4 pays attention to transparency when calculating shadows from this plane, then it should only let light fall through where the transmap is black.

Yes bagginsbill...I think you can attach it to a light. And I am doing just that. The problem was the textured plane I was using was not working as it was supposed to or as my previous experiences suggested it would.
It dawned on me that using a high contrast black and white image to a flat plane and adding transparency would work better than using a full color plane with no contrast image and no transparency. So Redhawk over at Seventh Complex cooked me up a few optional textures with some software that works only on PCs that creates this sort of Caustic-like textures. A few regular color and because he agreed with my idea of using high contrast B&W on a trans plane, did me a few variables of that to both positive & Negative to try.

That's it man! Now as soon as I have the time to play with them I will try these textures out and see what comes of it. Because I have done this sort of thing creating regular ambiance shadows in the old app before I am confident I can pull it off again.

*It dawned on me that using a high contrast black and white image to a flat plane and adding transparency would work better

• Let's be clear: use a high contrast black and white image AS THE TRANSPARENCY of the flat plane, not attach the image to the color and enable transparency.

If you just "add transparency" the whole thing will be transparent.

The phrase "using a ... image to a flat plane" seems ambiguous, and if by that you meant associating that with the color of the plane, that is irrelevent. You're not going to be looking at the plane, so the color of it won't matter. It's the pattern in the transparency that will be relevent.
 You could make the plane green and pink - it won't matter. All that matters is the transmap.

I bring this up because you said you're not getting patterned shadows. If you did not apply any pattern to the transparency channel, then that is what would happen.

All your wordings seemed to imply that you expect the plane to behave like a real gel. It doesn't. The colors of the plane, even if partially transparent, will have no effect on Poser's interpretation of the light passing through it. It either blocks or doesn't block, but never changes the color.

Exactly. I seem to be using the wrong terminology here but in effect I am trying to say what you are.
I understand and that is why I gave up on the color ripple texture mapped to the flat plane I was originally shining light through. That is why I decided to use a high contrast black and white texture map on a flat plane, either positive or negative add transparency added so the shadows would be created by the lights filtering through the transmapped plane. What I understand is that the transmapped flat plane will work as a mask...sort of like pointing a light at your hand..it is opaque so it casts a shadow on the wall.

Are we on the same page now!?  :)

*Actually in the post I said I thought i would need to do that but wasn't sure if it would work. I didn't want to attempt it to create something else that would also not work. Basically I was fishing for the right way to create the needed texture. At the time I didn't think about the black for transparency rule for Poser4.
In this texture you placed on the plane you have black text...yes? And then you ramped up transparency...yes?
When I tried it there was no black in the texture I used to texture the flat plane. It was just a generic color water ripple texture. So when I ramped up the transparency it didn't work. it took me a while to figure out why: There was no black in the image I used.
Now take the same flat plane, create a water surface ripple in BLACK & WHITE where the black becomes transparent and the white acts as a solid mask, same as the color portions of your sample render....yes?
that was the problem I failed to understand then. Now I understand it. That is why when it came to me I mentioned it to my friend over at the other site. who had the application necessary to create the needed textures for trying the idea.
I am just a bit slow in working things out that is all.

As far as all the time I have spent here. I don't render with this computer I am posting here with....yet! So nothing was lost. been too busy of late looking for real work to mess with this project. I posted the request to get my ducks in a row and now the needed textures to work on the project as soon as I am able to.

:)