I've been googling, searching on BlenderArtists.org (which is like googling), haunting YouTube, reading everything I can on procedural materials for Blender Cycles and doing quite a few tutorials, only to find out that anything procedural is for Blender Internal. Not Cycles.

So.

I'd like to explore this a bit here (instead of exposing my ignorance over at BA... people here know I'm ignorant, whereas they only suspect it there :biggrin: ) just to see what anyone playing with Blender might think.

I've looked at several solutions for water, specifically: seawater. Seawater - according to some - is really not blue per se... it's more like a slate grey with a hint of blue in it. I tend to agree: when the sun went away in the afternoons on the Big Island of Hawai`i, we used to stare out at water that looked a lot like this waiting for a set to come in (I was a terrible surfer, but loved the atmosphere out on the water):

I know - nothing to write home about. BTW, that lighter patch is where a wave had broken not long before. But anyway, it was a procedural shader. Kind-of. The large waves were generated with the ocean modifier:

...and here's the Cycles shader:

So, why did I go with Musgrave(fBm)? I tried - yep, eyeballed :blink: - a number of the others and tried to tweak them but they quickly went from bad to worse. However, I'm open to ideas on this. In any event, from Poser:

... I did like how this looked, and could see how this could work as a rough-ish water surface. And none of the other Cycles choices:

... jumped out at me with a "pick ME, pick ME"... :biggrin:

Anyway, hope to hear from others who might have some thoughts on this. BTW, this was using an image (a jpg, not hdr) on World as background / Environment texture. When i tried to just do the same image on a plane in the background, I got something a bit less agreeable. Just rendering 100 frames now, but the 6-frame render looked a bit meh.

Monterey/Mint21.x/Win10 - Blender3.x - PP11.3(cm) - Musescore3.6.2

Wir sind gewohnt, daß die Menschen verhöhnen was sie nicht verstehen
[it is clear that humans have contempt for that which they do not understand] 

Metaphor of Chooks

What about using BI to set up a procedural texture and baking it to an image?

It is better to do one thing well, than to do many things and excel at nothing.

Well, that's just the point. All the tutorials focus on a BI solution: I'm looking for something purely Cycles.

 

Call me mad... :biggrin:

Monterey/Mint21.x/Win10 - Blender3.x - PP11.3(cm) - Musescore3.6.2

Wir sind gewohnt, daß die Menschen verhöhnen was sie nicht verstehen
[it is clear that humans have contempt for that which they do not understand] 

Metaphor of Chooks