Quote - Just my two pennies. Paolo's the man to suggest a better solution. ;-) 

There is nothing special about the Reality water plane except that I took the necessary steps to make it work. If you look at the geometry of many environments, the single surfaces are very low-poly. For example, if the scene has a rectangular swimming pool, the water plane there might be even a single polygon. In many cases it's a matter of single-digit resolution. You cannot displace something that has such low resolution, no matter how much you subdivide it.

The Reality water plane has fine geometry which gets even finer by the default two levels of subdivisions applied by Reality. That allows the surface to be displaced nicely by the ripples effect. You can add any piece of geometry to Studio for water effects. Just make sure that:

• It has fine geometry that can be displaced (look at the Reality water plane for help)

• The normals are oriented correctly. Where the normals point to is consider "exterior," the other side is the interior of the water volume.

Follow those two single steps and you can model any shape. Remember that you can create any primitive in Studio with subdivisions. Look at the window that pops up when you create a cube, a plane etc. A well subdivided cube with D-formers applied can work pretty well. Otherwise Blender/ZBrush/modo are your friends :)

Hope this helps.

Paolo

https://www.preta3d.com
FB: https://www.facebook.com/RealityPlugIn
Tw: @preta3d
G+: https://plus.google.com/106625816153304163119
The Reality Gallery: https://reality-plug-in.deviantart.com