Quote - > Quote - sbt.. i'm a complete noob at using reality's water material.. i'll get the hang of it sooner or later.  along with the 2 or 3 dozen other features of reality that i know nothing about

Quote - 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.

 @Sharkbytes...

If you go to this link... http://fav.me/d57fqrm there are links to three quick tutorials that I did for using the Reality water plane and some Dformers in daz3 (they are also in the Reality plug-in at Deviant Art 'tutorials' folder...) if you follow all three, you will be able to create the final image, even if you have not used Dformers before... The whole setup for the three tutorials (if I remember correctly) took one weekend to get to starting the final render...

(I'm sure I posted this only a short while ago, but for the fact it is relevant to your new rig and exploring the water material... `¬)

The set up below might look a little complecated (?), but if you follow the previous two tuts, it should become clear... If you give it a go, and have any queries, just ask! - either here or on the post at the link above...)

...must try and do some mad science work now! `¬) - double click for full size -

You could always export it as a preset (I think) and share it :lol:

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