How to create water for an exterior
Today we offer you to create a water surface to make it look realistic. We will use both the usual settings and the special Phoenix plugin from Chaos Group.
In principle, you can create water without the help of this plugin.
That's where we'll start.
The first thing we can start with is the unit settings. You can use millimeters for interiors and centimeters for exteriors.
1. Let's create an ordinary Plane to begin with. We place it in the center of the coordinates.
Set the size of the plane to 70 by 70 meters. The number of segments is not important.
2. As a renderer, assign the Corona renderer. We can use the interactive renderer to view the intermediate result.
3. In the render settings, let's set Single Map as the illumination. Later, you can put an HDRI card there.
Open the material editor and create a material Corona mtl, let's call it water.
5. Add an object, such as a teapot to our water.
6. Let's set Reflect to 1, Fresnel IOR to 1.33, let's set Refract to 1 and Fresnel IOR to 1.33 as well.
7. Choose the tab Volumetric and SSS, we will use Volumetric and the parameter Distance, Absorption and Color Scattering. We will not touch the direction parameter.
8. In the Absorption parameter we select the green-blue color, and add it to the Scattering color. Let's set the Distance to 2 meters.
9. Let's set the thickness of our plane with the Shell modifier. The value is set to 10 meters. This will be the depth of our reservoir.
10. Let's submerge the kettle halfway in water.
11. Let's make the Scattering color a little darker.
12. Let's copy our Plane and create the bottom. Let's make its thickness less than water. Let's assign some sand or soil material to it.
13. You can try to change the value in the Distance field. The more this value is, the better the bottom can be seen. Let's leave the value, for example, 6 meters. But you can do as you prefer.
14. Now in the settings of our material let's find the Displacement parameter. Let's put the standard Noise map in the Display slot.
15. Let's increase the size in the Noise parameter and put the Fractal parameter.
16. In the Display parameter put the maximum value of 0,5, and the minimum value of -0.5.
We have already got something similar to water. For a better look, let's add an HDRI map to the Render Setup. Corona bitmap, HDRI. We can rotate it in the settings of this map to better match the perspective.
Now let's get to the second part of setting the water. We will use a special Phoenix Ocean FD texture map.
1. Let's go again to the water material settings, to the Displacement parameter, and remove the Noise map. Instead, let's put the Phoenix Ocean FD texture map.
2. In the settings of this map the first line Vector Mode we will not touch. In the second line we can set the strength of the wind and thus change the scale of the waves. Let's try to set, for example, 6.
3. In addition to this we can change the level of detail and the Sharpeness parameter.
All settings can be changed to your liking, adjusting better the realism of the water.
You can also put the Corona Distances map in the Displacement Scaling slot.
Let's see what we get.
In order to make everything work, you need to click on the plus sign and then on our kettle floating in the water. (Have you forgotten about it? You didn't remove it, did you? Please put it back!)
Now let's adjust the settings below.
Let's set Distance Far to about 10 meters.
You can also set the wave attenuation Distance near, for example, near the shore. If suddenly you still removed the kettle and do not want to create it back.
Also, in the Displacement Scaling slot, you can put a normal, standard Wave map.
Experiment, create beautiful water effects and have a good rendering!
You can download the Phoenix plugin here: https://www.chaos.com/phoenix
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