Water rendering

[novais]

Hello,

I'm trying to create a image of a dam and it's future lake.

The dam rendering is fine but 'im having trouble with the water materials.

I'm using the lakepond that comes in the autodesk library but when i try to render, it draws a solid yellow, and if i tweat the few options avaiable it draws a very shallow thing.Even when i apply the material with realistic view, it only shows blue dots.

Can you help, giving some clues or hints. I'm a bit beginner with rendering.

Many thanks,

Nuno

[pendean]

Show us your DWG file please

[novais]

The pic01 is in realistic mode and the pic02 is the rendered window.

Thanks.

Edited by Request
Discussion_Admin

[dgorsman]

A couple of stabs in the dark.  Your material scale may not be appropriate for the size of the object ie. the object is much larger or smaller than expected for the texture.  You may need to try scaling the material up and/or down an order of magnitude then inspect the results.  Another thought is considering the material reflectance and angle of viewing - there could be too much light being reflected back to the camera resulting in that pure-white appearance.  You may want to try dialing the material reflectance back as well as adjusting the lighting to see if that produces a change.

[pendean]

Those aren't DWG files 😞

[novais]

Here it is.

Thanks!

Edited by Request
Discussion_Admin

[Alfred.NESWADBA · Accepted solution]

Hi,

your scene is not complete, you try to render a water surface without having anything below the water (to get shown by the transparency of the water surface) and without having defined the environment (to get shown by the reflectivity of the water surface).

For me it's a "none closed system", that means a ray from the camera to the scene does not find a defined end and so it does not have a defined color.

As sample: from your camera to the mid of the lake a ray is send to get a color for a pixel in the mid of the resulting image. The ray reaches the water surface and as water is defined e.g. 45% of the ray pass through the surface to find what material/color is below the surface and 45% are reflected (to the sky/clouds) to find what color is defined there, these 2 values + 10% of the water itself are then calculated to one mixed color for that point ... so 90% of the color is not defined, that's the problem of your render result.

Make the system "closed", so first define lightning (could be a sun), then define what is below the water, how is your sky defined (either by sky defintiion or a big, big sphere around your scene with a sky texture and I guess you will have success imediately.

Happy render, - alfred -

[novais]

Thanks for your suggestions, like i said before, i'm a rookie in rendering, so i thought that the water material should look realistic like the concrete material in the dam, before rendering.
For the rest of the scenario, i've draped an ortho photo into a civil surface of the terrain that will give me the enclosure of the lake, so part of it will stay below water level, that's why i would also want a water material opaque, without any transparency, showing the lake, dam and margins.

[Alfred.NESWADBA]

Hi,

>> that's why i would also want a water material opaque

In that case you can't use any of the predefined liquid materials as they are all transparent (afaik).

BTW: beautiful area! 😉

- alfred -

[novais]

Thanks,

So what material could i use? i tried a google image for the lake but it wasn't any good...

Search in sites for water materials?

Thanks

[Alfred.NESWADBA · Accepted solution]

Hi,

>> So what material could i use?

Use a default material (copy the material called "Global"), use bumb map for waves simulation, any images from water as texturemap, and don't make it transparent.

Another option: copy your surface and move it 0.5m downwards, give that object a dark nne-transparent material so the surface above can stay transparent.

- alfred -