That's a great point, Helgard. While developing the shader, it was obvious that the Atmosphere alone wasn't convincing. I had to make a ground prop and a decent vegetation shader for it. I had to make the caustic light shader, and the water plane shader, and a custom IBL. Putting that all together in various combinations would, indeed, be much more valuable than the Atmosphere shader alone. So that's what I'll do.

richardson - You make a good point, and I think I can remedy that.  Note that the caustic effect is just something I threw in for good measure, and is not a feature of the Atmosphere effect. It's simply a procedural mask applied to the main light, and not based on physics, but just a quick cheat. I don't have a lot of reference material to go by. The interesting thing about the scattered light effect is that I didn't plan it - I didn't look at reference images and then set out to imitate that. I simply set up a fairly accurate assessment of the physics, and how it looks just came out. On the other hand, the caustics are totally faked. They are going to do what I tell them to do, no more, no less, so I need to know more specifically what they do so I can program that into the approximation.

If you guys know of some good references, that would be helpful. Particularly ones involving deep water and large objects. Most of the images of submarines I see are actually renders and I suppose if they are convincing, it would be fair to copy what they look like. But I'd prefer real photos.

 

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Renderosity forum reply notifications are wonky. If I read a follow-up in a thread, but I don't myself reply, then notifications no longer happen AT ALL on that thread. So if I seem to be ignoring a question, that's why. (Updated September 23, 2019)