HOW DOES THE BRYCE PEOPLE MAKE WATER MATS?

depends on the mats. I do believe that the settings for each mat can be seen. Maybe you can make a copy of a given mat, and just start 'dial twisting', and see what comes up.

Also depends on what you need them for. If it's like for a swimming pool, use a cube and apply the mats to that. It gives it real 'depth'. THere are a few water mats in Freebies if you need them. There are also lots of free water textures if you want to Google them. Simply apply them in the Texture manager thing.

There is also a little free app I like called caustics generator.

http://www.dualheights.se/caustics/

It creates seamless images of wave patterns. They can be used somewhat for driving material channels. The best use is as a gel over lights for underwater scenes.

For the actual editor click on a water plane and create it then click om the M to bring up the material editor. If you look at several waters you will see most images are just driving bump height. Just about every water has a refraction around 133. Some will have transparency that allows you to look under the surface. In these the Volume gives the water it's color. In reflective waters with no transparency the color can come from a combination of specular and halo colors.. Only things like radioactive water use any diffuse or ambient colors. In most waters these are set to zero.

To the right of the buttons on the material editor there is a column with ABCD. The A should be filled with a little box with three windows. It has two buttons close together and then one on the opposite end along the top and bottom edges. If you move the mouse over the center top button you should see the words Texture Source Editor appear in the top window. Click that to open the Deep Texture Editor.

I just use the transparency and refraction settings with a little specular and reflection, the adjust the transparency color swatch etc to get the desired color.