Hey there good fellow posers....I need a helpful tip with doing an underwater scene,I have textured my Zygote Bass and I need to know what is the best setup for rendering a realistic underwater scene....I have some freshwater backgrounds....and I know how to make things transparent....what would be the best approach to this.......Thanx for your time.... Binx [NS13]

Unfortunatly the answer I have is to use another program like Bryce or Vue to do this render. It is almost esential to have a program that does something in the way of fog, or volumetrics (particles in the air or in your case water) for an underwater scene. I'm sure it is somewhat possible in Poser, but I assume that it would be a diffucult task to get it just right. One way would be to put several planes with varing amounts of transparency (somone long ago did a water obj that used this) but you end up with a banding effect. To really get the depth of an underwater scene another program would make the task much easier, and I think you'd be happier with the end results. Remember, Poser is not a Raytracing program. Again you might also experiment with different planes and put different depth scenes on them again with transparency. But this is speculation on my part, as I do have several other programs that I'd use to make an underwater scene. I hope this isn't to depresing an answer. I have seen some very talented people here do some amazing things within Poser that one may have thought impossible. James

Definately! Bryce is the way to go. You could get a nice murky scene to put your bass in or a nice clear stream to put him in. There are a lot of tuts on the web that are just for underwater scenes and even include caustics (those ripples of light that form on the bottom of a pool of clear water)! (www.fignations.com) I am working on an underwater scene with a merman from zygote that has nothing but terrains and fog! Makes a very convincing scene. Tankred

While I will not argue the merits of Bryce as no doubt being the prefered method for doing this, if you are going to attempt this in Poser go to free stuff and do a search for Ashlocke's water prop (this is, I think, the same prop that James referred to). This is the "I don't have Bryce, let me try it in Poser approach" The really hard part of trying to do something like this in Poser and what normally makes it extremely frustrating and generally impossible to pull off is trying to create the scene all in one render using only one light setup. My suggestion would be to set your background color to the color you would like for your water or if you have a background pic in mind load it. Pose your figures and props and set up your lights and do a test render to see how it looks. Then turn on the depth cue setting and do a test render using depth cuing. For depth cuing you may need to tweak and/or brighten your lights. You might also want to import a ball prop, make it completely transparent, and put it in front of all the other props. Then by moving it forward or backward along the ztrans you can control the effects of the depth cuing on the other stuff in your scene to some degree. With a bit of experimenting you should be able to create a new background image that has the sort of look you want lighting wise (whether with depth cuing on or off depends on which render you like the best). The big thing here is to get the props/figures arranged and lighted more or less the way you want them. Once you have this looking more or less right, render the pic and save it to use as a background. You might also want to save light and camera presets and the also the pz3 file at this point. Now import the backgroud pic you made and load in Ashlocke's water prop. [You can leave the props and figures for now and see how they work out, or you may want to go to the heirarchy and hide them - you will want to try them in the scene though when you do the depth cue test render.] Resize and position the water prop so that it is turned on its side (facing the camera so you can shoot through it) and in front of everything else in the pic, and fills the entire display window. Now do a test render and see how it looks. Then try one with depth cuing off (on). This will give you an idea of what to try next. You may need to adjust the prop material settings or tweak the lights, but with a bit of trial and error you should get a good underwater look for your scene. Oh one more thing, make sure that you turn the cast shadows off for the water prop in the object properties window, otherwise the shadow its cast may black out your scene. Maybe that will help get you started in the right direction if you are going to try this in Poser. Ultimately, it will take a lot of trial and error to get it right. But hey, Poser is all some of us have to work with, right; and I have managed to turn out a few descent pics using just Poser alone. So if that is your lot, don't give up on your idea thinking it can not be done in Poser. Bryce is just better suited for this sort of thing. Rob

Heya, thought of something else. Fox-Mulder made a really cool underwater scene using the wave deformer on a box prop. I found one of the threads (he did several on use of the wave deformer) but it looks like the pics are gone. Might check with him. It was really well done. http://www.renderosity.com/messages.ez?Form.ShowMessage=188460

Thanx guys.....