You set this shader up on it (save it so you can use again and again).

The shader has a blender where you get to put what color to use on the bottom half of the environment sphere. This obliterates whatever nasty bottom image is there, like this road and desert.

This is a very useful technique to manipulate your water's color.

But at some angles, IDL is fast. This was a 20 second render with IDL.

Experiment. Don't be afraid to try more advanced techniques. They are not always slow.

After this weekend (I'm going away) I'll return from this above-water diversion and get our camera back under the water.

As regards converting a "rounded the same upwards and downwards" procedural wave such as the procedural clouds surface, into a form more pointed on top like water waves, I have been playing about with equations.

If the vertical dimension is y, if the procedural clouds surface is y = f(x,z) :-

As a plain water wave train of only one wavelength moves, each surface molecule of water moves not straight up and down but in a vertical circle, forwards on top and backwards at the bottom. If a is the amplitude and b is how many waves in distance 2*pi, the plain wave train becomes a cycloid with pointed tops when a/b = 1.

Work out the procedural clouds surface at plenty of sets of values of x y z.

At each (x,z) point, work out u = integral y d x , and v = integral y d z

The lower integration limits should the same right through.

Replace each x by its x+u, and each z by its z+v.

In areas where this puts the points out of order in x or z and the y=f(x,z) surface is folded over itself, the wave has broken and there should be a foam patch there.

Thanks for the toys! I have an ocean scene that I've been tinkering with. It's sure to work better with a BBocean. :)

Maybe an Ocean Front version 2 might be on the cards, if you can persuade DreamlandModels?

This is a great point, Anthony, and while I like your suggestion, I don't see a way to integrate a 3D fractal in Poser.

I have, however come up with something effective but simple.

Assuming the fractal cloud (C) is roughly sinusoidal (with suitable randomness applied, of course) in the range 0 to 1, it can be converted to something very close to a trochoid like this.

1 - Abs(2C - 1)

I modified my plugin to use that and here is the result.

This is an improvement and I'm sure I can fix it, but I have to get ready to go away for the weekend.

Oooh, that's a nice touch - great work, BB!

o.k., enjoy yer vacation (unless it's in Providence) and thx fr great water shader! 

those hdrilabs sets come with IBL whose UV co-ordinates may be recalculated to polar (altitude/azimuth or x-rot/y-rot on poser inf-lite).  e.g. desert highway is xrot -24, yrot 80.

ERRATUM :-

I wrote:

"If a is the amplitude and b is how many waves in distance 2pi, the plain wave train becomes a cycloid with pointed tops when a/b = 1*."

This should be:-

"If a is the amplitude (= half the wave height), the plain wave train becomes a cycloid with pointed tops when (wavelength / a) = 2*pi."

Hi Everyone, I have just come across this interesting thread.I have been trying for over twelve months to get animated water in Poser Pro 2014 without much success.Without wanting to diverse from the original thread,Is it possible to animate the water from the OBJ from TurboSquid? I also have been trying to get a WW2 U-Boat travelling in heavy weather on the surface. I have also tried it in Vue 11 Infinite. However with my 4 Poser figures (animated as crew) it takes forever to to just render a preview. Poser seems to handle this better! Cheers

Attached Link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cycloid#Related_curves

If the complete water wave pattern could be split (by a method somewhat like Fourier analysis) into various wave trains (each with its own one frequency), then the speed of each wave train is proportionate to the square root of its wavelength. That is why on the sea, big long waves roll on fast and overtake small overlying ripples.

If amplitude * 2 * pi / wavelength is small, the curve is nearly a sine wave, but the tops are curved slightly sharper then the bottoms. If amplitude * 2 * pi < wavelength, the curve is a curtate cycloid; the tops are curved sharper then the bottoms.

If amplitude * 2 * pi = wavelength, the curve is a cycloid; the tops are sharp.

If amplitude * 2 * pi > wavelength, the curve is a prolate cycloid; the tops are loops, and on the surface water tries to go through other water, but cannot, and breaks into foam.

For curtate and prolate cycloids, see the image at is link.

It is not the same with light waves and sound waves.

Quote - OK I found the underwater runtime. I have to do some work to use it. Upon loading the scene into PP2014, it changed the names of my props, adding _1 to them all. This messed up the script which expected names like "WaterPlane", not "WaterPlane_1".

I'm improving some of the materials. Here's a demo.

Bumping again, did the shader to attach to the atmosphere depth cue ever get put up somewhere? I've got an underwater scene to render and have been looking everywhere.

I did not release it. But I'm gonna send you a dropbox link to a zip file containing all the work as it exists so you can play. 

Hi, I found this thread by looking for water-related materials - and it still looks really impressive!

I wonder if you have ever tried to adapt use this type of material on extremely shallow water surfaces? I am primarily for procedually generated tears (and teary eyes). I have been playing around with a shader by RedViper from ShareCG. For pretty much everything else, I am meanwhile getting better results outside of Firefly (e.g., Reality and Luxrender) - but not for this kind of thing.

Any advice?

Referring back to setting up a non-linear falloff for the Poser atmosphere's DepthCue, way back in Jul 2010 on page 3 of this thread with bagginsbill's post that endedwith,

b = x / (1 - .5 ^ (x / h))

Wow - Yay! This is exactly the compensation function we need to make the Poser Atmosphere attenuation function do what we want. We need to plug a node network into DepthCue_EndDist, also known as "b", that implements the function we just arrived at.

Great. So all we need is the distance from the camera to the point being rendered.

Uhoh. There is no node that does that. I wish there was. Are we dead?

Nope. If we accept a tiny bit of manual work setting up a shader, we can get this done.

But ... it's really late and I've got to go to bed. So, more tomorrow."

followed by the tantalizing question on page 4 that ended bagginsbill's penultimate post that same day:

...can you figure out how we can calculate the distance from the camera to the object?

I've searched the rest of the thread, and I've racked my brains - but I just can't find/figure out the answer.

Can anybody enlighten me?

??? In the Poser 9 material room how can I get the distance from the camera to the point being rendered ???

After a bit more thought I have a potential answer - 15 nodes, but you have to manually enter the camera's x, y, and z coordinates into three nodes.

I've posted my possible solution to my "Distance From Camera To Point Being Rendered ?" thread in RDNAs Node Cult forum

http://forum.runtimedna.com/showthread.php?104645-Distance-From-Camera-To-Point-Being-Rendered

Posting here just for continuity but otherwise I'm not here.

You are correct - no node will, by itself, give us the coordinate of the camera. However, a small, continuously running background python script does so with ease. I later wrote such a script. I use it to copy the camera coordinates into a User_Defined node in the shader.

Now -- given that you got this far, I'll tell you that 15 nodes is way more than necessary. Here's a hint: in FireFly, vector math and color math are the same damn thing.

The P (rendered point position) node gives a vector. The User_Defined node (for camera position) also gives a vector. How small can you get it using that tip?

I don't have time to ever finish this thing to perfection. I have uploaded all the work I did -- caveat emptor. Go get it -- BBUnderWaterRuntime.zip.

https://sites.google.com/site/bagginsbill/free-stuff/tutorial-scenes

Note: I do not get notified here about replies so I don't come here to talk anymore. I am also avoiding RDNA now. I am at CGBytes.

caveat emptor.

Caveat receptor!

Oh, thank you, thank you!

Yet again, thank you bagginsbill - time to register at cgbytes.

Now I do the math. As before, the transmission is 50% at 80 feet. But, with the correct asymptotic falloff, the transmission is 25% at 160 feet, not 0. At 250 feet (where the second sub conning tower is) the transmission is about 11.5%. At the tail of the second sub, about 360 feet away, the transmission is about 4.4%. The transmission *never* goes to 0.

Bagginsbill site is documented on the WayBack machine internet archive. His downloads are still available there. When you click the download link for the UnderWaterRuntime zip there will be a long redirect and it will seem like it's not working but the file WILL download after a wait. This is via Chrome and has just been tested with a successful download...

Link to UnderWaterScene zip

UnderWaterScene zip

Image of just downloaded file (via Chrome on my Samsung Tablet)...

Apparently the zip also contains a python script that automates what you are trying to do. I haven't looked at it or the contents of the zip yet. Who knows if the python will work in the version of Poser you are using.

General link to Internet Archive Snapshot of BB's site Homepage

BB Site Home Page

You're welcome

primorge posted at 8:49 PM Thu, 27 October 2022 - #4447720

Apparently the zip also contains a python script that automates what you are trying to do. I haven't looked at it or the contents of the zip yet. Who knows if the python will work in the version of Poser you are using.

Apparently the zip also contains a python script that automates what you are trying to do. I haven't looked at it or the contents of the zip yet. Who knows if the python will work in the version of Poser you are using.

The depth-cue is entirely in the atmosphere shader. The color is affected by distance to the surface as well as distance from the camera so you're right that it is more than just correcting the linear attenuation. Hmmmm. I don't even have Poser where I'm at. Maybe you could screenshot the shader and post it here and I can look it over?

The post over at Hivewire that moogal mentioned sounds like one of mine. I remember bagginsbill guiding me through the creation of the realistic falloff depth cue shader on the CGBytes Poser material room forum (the node knows?) and posting a screenshot of the complete shader over there.

But that forum seems to have disappeared.

I'm fairly sure that I have all the information including an MT5 on my laptop, but that's at home whereas I'm not. Not sure how long you'll have to wait though, so posting a screenshot of the atmosphere shader you downloaded as bagginsbill suggests may be the quickest.

The internet archive / wayback machine ( archive.org ) has several snapshots for 2018-2019 of the CGBytes "Distance from camera to point being rendered" topic (original URL https://www.cgbytes.com/community/forums.aspx?g=posts&t=115138#post125025 ). but rather infuriatingly the images don't seem to have been captured, just the text.

Working frpm memory and the text on the internet archive snapshot of the CGBytes page I think it was something like this ?

At least one probable mistake in the sketch above: L don't think you can use a P node for the camera position - I think it used the node where you can set a colour by specifying r,g,b values and setting r=cameraX, g=cameraY, and b=cameraZ. 'User Defined' node rings a bell.