I really love the presets for the terrains. They show a very high potential, but I'm a bit disappointed about the water shader presets. Are there any realistic water presets available or is there a tutorial somewhere? I don't think the default presets come anywhere near to the results that are possible.

I'm sorry I can't help you here...just thought I'd chime in add a yes...the water is lacking.....It takes some tweaking to get it right & I have yet to see any tuts out there for this. Took me days to get what I did in my last pic. Struggling with this myself.

one thing that you may want to do is open up one of the full terrain scenes from the scenewizard one that contains water. than edit that water shader and add the new Fresnel and apply an index of refraction. Once you are happy with the way it looks save the shader.

It's worth looking at the Eovia/Carrara Landscape tutorial by Johannes Rosenberg in the section "water".

Hi Singular, Water is always a bit of a challenge because changing lighting, what's underneath the surface or changing the environment can have a huge effect. (Just like a cloudy day or a sunny day making the ocean look gray or blue) Because of that, presets are a good starting point but need to be adjusted about 95% of the time. What type of water are you looking for? I'll see what I can post up here for you. Mark

Hi all, you are very helpful as always. Vue5 has some nice water shaders and I was always amazed about the realistic water in Terragen. When I purchased Carrara 5 Pro some weeks ago, I was amazed about the great terrain shaders and the variation there. Compared to that the examples of water shaders are only few. I would like to see examples for a rough sea, tropical water and so on. Hoped that someone already played around a bit and made his presets available for inspiration. In case of a deep blue sea or a high reflective surface the terrain below the water is not visible. I agree though that the lighting and atmosphere has a strong influence on the final appearence. Another question: What about displacement mapping for generating real waves in a rough sea? Or is it better to do this with a terrain? I also would love to see a hint, how to make surf on a beach. I think I didn't even see more than 10% of Carrara's potential yet. We just have to investigate them further and share our knowledge. I plan to do so on my homepage. By the way, the tutorial of Johannes Rosenberg is fantastic, although it is for Carrara 4. It already helped me a lot to understand terran generation and shading. Thanks to all - Walter

Attached Link: http://www.eovia.com/solutions/user_projects/user_proj_pt.asp

Hi, Walter. Patrick Tuten is the feature artist at Eovia this month. Check out the link, he give some good tips regarding over all landscaping. Here is a quote where he hints about an upcoming plugin from DCG that does surf. "The shader for the water plane is very important and sometimes the most difficult to get realistic. With Carrara 5 Pro the new Fresnel aspects of the transparency and reflection channels add a new dimension to the creation of realistic water. Previously, you could have used the DCG plugin Shader Ops to achieve the same results, and can still use it now if you want a little more control. The goal is to make the water more reflective as it is farther away and more transparent as it is closer. I like to use a mixer in the bump channel so that the bump is not uniform across the whole surface. The Surf aspect of the Terrain Tools shader is a great new tool coming out, which detects the intersection of the terrain and the water plane, and creates an Anything Goos type shader. This allows you to create the foam or wave froth in the coastline scene or the floating residue near the bank in the stream scene. It can also simulate depth in the water by creating a falloff of transparency as the water gets farther away from the shoreline. A color in the translucency channel can add a nice tone to the water also. With scenes where the water goes to the horizon, I like to use Shader Ops Fresnel to make the waters bump channel fall off in the distance to avoid any weird render artifacts." So as you can see anything is possible with Carrara 5

Thanks for the information Ringo. This is very interesting stuff. Have to follow up on this.

Thanks Ringo....that mini tut explains a lot :)

Creating surf without Digital Carvers Guild Terrain Tools is possible but it will slowly drive you insane. The above image uses Terrain Tools for the foam and color change on the rocks. Patrick's excellent mini tut at Eovia shows some other more subtle applications of it. When Eric finally makes it available at DCG, it will be the missing link for Carrara landscapes! :-D Mark

Seems to be a 'must have'. I really love Carrara, but it will be even better with those little additions. God save the plugins ;-))

Great read on Eovia, thanks Patrick! for the distribution shader, (black and white) I have been doing what Thomas did in his tutorial and taking a screen grab and editing in ps, but can it be done inside carrara? Just wondering, because his detail looks so good as if it were painted in carrara itself.

It can be done within Carrara, but only with a to-be-released plug in called Terrain Tools. There are some other shader methods you can use to approximate it but it takes foreveeeeeeeeeeeeeer.

Ahh, that's what I saw in that screen grab then. Bravo. :)

No, the screen grab of the distribution shader is a simple terrain distribution. You make the global shader 100% black and then use a "custom" distribution on a new layer. Make that white, with the influence 100% and set the min and max height. Terrain Tools is only used in the water shader.

Thanks for the clarification Patrick!

I'm taking notes and playing with the settings, but I havn't quite got it yet. I see what you did, but not exactly how you did it and specifically how you determine the height that you want the white layer to go to on any given terrain. It starts at -833333 and goes to 833333 in the range and I did 1 ft to 3 ft for instance with no luck yet just trying to isolate a white band anywhere on the terrain. Any chance of another mini-tut with settings and more screen grabs? :) I want to get this down, it's awesome. Steven

I've always been exporting maps and hand painting stuff in 2d, which is a nightmare and pretty hit or miss for the most part, I never knew this was possible until now... Excellent stuff Patrick.

This should help clear it up.

:)

Very cool. What a great plugin.

Any date for the release of this plugin?

Don't have the foggiest idea. Eric has a lot on his plate right now. :)

Oh, the pressures of talent ;)