I've been googling, searching on BlenderArtists.org (which is like googling), haunting YouTube, reading everything I can on procedural materials for Blender Cycles and doing quite a few tutorials, only to find out that anything procedural is for Blender Internal. Not Cycles.

So.

I'd like to explore this a bit here (instead of exposing my ignorance over at BA... people here know I'm ignorant, whereas they only suspect it there :biggrin: ) just to see what anyone playing with Blender might think.

I've looked at several solutions for water, specifically: seawater. Seawater - according to some - is really not blue per se... it's more like a slate grey with a hint of blue in it. I tend to agree: when the sun went away in the afternoons on the Big Island of Hawai`i, we used to stare out at water that looked a lot like this waiting for a set to come in (I was a terrible surfer, but loved the atmosphere out on the water):

I know - nothing to write home about. BTW, that lighter patch is where a wave had broken not long before. But anyway, it was a procedural shader. Kind-of. The large waves were generated with the ocean modifier:

...and here's the Cycles shader:

So, why did I go with Musgrave(fBm)? I tried - yep, eyeballed :blink: - a number of the others and tried to tweak them but they quickly went from bad to worse. However, I'm open to ideas on this. In any event, from Poser:

... I did like how this looked, and could see how this could work as a rough-ish water surface. And none of the other Cycles choices:

... jumped out at me with a "pick ME, pick ME"... :biggrin:

Anyway, hope to hear from others who might have some thoughts on this. BTW, this was using an image (a jpg, not hdr) on World as background / Environment texture. When i tried to just do the same image on a plane in the background, I got something a bit less agreeable. Just rendering 100 frames now, but the 6-frame render looked a bit meh.

What about using BI to set up a procedural texture and baking it to an image?

Well, that's just the point. All the tutorials focus on a BI solution: I'm looking for something purely Cycles.

Call me mad... :biggrin: