Water Blur is the Roughness of the Refraction node, changes the blur of the water, but not the reflections. I think the settings are fairly easy to follow.ĭepth Color is what you want the water to change to as it gets deeper.ĭepth Strength allows you to increase/decrease the color change. This gives me my Water & Reflection Base node. So, I incorporated his setup into my own and grouped it all together. The tutorial is brilliant and I highly recommend it:Â His process is fantastic, is surprisingly simple (the math isn’t the easiest to follow, but he does a nice job of simplifying it for you. To be more accurate, someone else had figured it out and I found his tutorial. This one was a real bear and I had to resort to a bit of research to figure it out. Next, there is the issue of the color change that often occurs when you have water, or any liquid, that reaches a certain depth. So, you wouldn’t want to do this if you only want clear water or you don’t mind that both the water and the reflections are blurred the same amount.
This setup takes significantly longer to render than just using a Glass node. One node for the water itself, a Refraction node, and one node for the reflection, a Glossy node. Think water with something dissolved in it. When he put in the chemicals, the water turned a bit cloudy, but the reflections on the water did not lose any clarity. I can think of many instances where this would be the case. While watching the pool guy add his chemicals to my the water one day, it occurred to me that this is not always what I would want. The issue is that the Glass Roughness causes a blur in the water refraction and the water reflection. Here, I set the Glass node’s Roughness to 0.05ĭepending on your desired result, this may be way off. You just set the Glass Roughness to your desired amount. Let’s say you want the water to be cloudy. Note that this is the same Displacement setup as listed above. This is the material for the prior scene. Sure, for many scenes, just using the Glass node will work very well. Having tackled that aspect (and feeling quite happy with myself about it), I then wanted a better water material. You could even make it even more basic or more complicated by following this structure. As it turned out, the setup is very simple. So, I worked out a way to create a calm water surface using texture nodes.
I began by trying to get the Ocean Modifier to work however, that modifier is either not suited for calm water or I just have not really learned how to use it properly. Specifically, I was going for a calm water effect. Some time back, I wanted to create a water material in Blender. Plus, by explaining what I have done helps me to understand it all better. Since I have gained so much from the online community, I felt I owed it to others to share my little experiment, on the off chance that it may be useful to anyone else. I only present this as my progress in creating a better water/liquid node for my uses. I am quite confident that there are many people who are far more experienced in using Blender (or other rendering apps) that could come up with a better and/or more streamlined material. I do not submit that this is the best method. This is the basic scene I’ll be using to display the different materials later on. The point of these elements is to make it easier to see some of the material aspects as I progress through this project. The elements in the “base” scene will not change. For many of the examples I will show, I’ll be using a simple scene. However, there is always a risk with downloaded files.]įirst, a quick note. I do my best to screen everything and keep my site protected.
Here it is. Better Liquid Material – As always, be sure to scan the zip file before opening it. : Not sure why I didn’t include the material. I am republishing it here (because, why not do everything I can to drive traffic to my own site, rather than another?) This is a post I had previously published on Behance about creating a cycles water material in Blender, in August 15, 2014.