liquid terrain - help needed re: reflections

[juandel]

ola ZBs!

i am trying to do Z-water using the superneato alphaterrainway pixolator taught us here. i am rather content with the alpha i did (using the fiberbrush at defaultsettings except that gravity was set at zero and a little thickness added to cover the canvas once and offsetting z on the alphaselected 3d-plane (material gelshadera) at about 10) but my experiments to get the proper reflections did not lead me where i wanted to go (i want an island to be reflected towards the viewer).



i have increased the reflectivity in the materials-modifiers, i replaced the texture with a mrgbz-grabbed one, i enabled environment scene, texture at different values of field of view... but i never found the results to be convincing. may this be due to the fact that the plane was a) rotated and b) perspectively distorted via the draw-palette-settings?

any hints welcome!

TIA
juandel

[aurick]

Try this out:

Create the land on the topmost layer. Create the water on the second layer. For the third layer, use the MRGBZ grabber to create a texture from the land, only, with shading on. Everything else should be black. Flip your texture vertically and apply it as a transparent texture to a 3DPlane that you can then rotate into position over the water. Set the plane's material to have some transparency.

You'll have to play around, and maybe switch layers 2&3, but I think this might do the trick for you.

[Vikki]

Hmmm, so far I've been painting mine on manually. I'll give Auricks' suggestion a try and see what happens.




Oops...forgot a step...back to the zboard. As far as I got was cool though. Worked kind of like applying water in Bryce. "Kind of like"...

[juandel]

splash! now thats where i would love to be right now, Vikki! what a lovely shore! muy bien!

thank you for the tip, Aurick! i think this is what i was missing... so here are my doodles (have not had much time) with different settings in the Field of View slider in the environmentsection of the render-palette. the last one was done with tweaking the reflectivitycurve in the gelshaderA’s materialmodifiers window:







looks like i still have a looong way to go, but it’s: FUN! any additional shortcuts would be most appreciated, though!

- juandel

[Vikki]

Oh Juandel! These are sooo cool! Hats off to you! The reflections are wonderful.

Now these look like something to dive right into!

[juandel]

hey, thank you, Vikki! (i like yours much better!)

the left and middle one below is what i managed to come up with using a few steps of "aurick’s transparencyway" (thank you! i hope i got all of your tips right) until now:



for this session i placed the textured plane below the plane with the water and increased the transparency of the water GelShaderA-material (i think to about 70, other values could look nicer) and turned off the flattenlayer-option in the render-modifiers to enable the GelShaderA to show it’s transparency.

on the middleone i started with some smearing to get those straight edges off, which of course should have been done on a duplicated layer of the "land"plane before snapshooting a texture with the MRGBZgrabber, but at that time i’m not going for any details. as i had turned off the flattenlayers to make the water’s transparency visible, i was busy rendering and repositioning and -organizing single layers

the right one was done using environmentals only (the texturedplane layer was turned off, transparency of water set to zero, flattenlayers on; the only (?) sun was set to the low right): i increased the env. reflectivity in the GelShaderA to max. 100 and in the renderpalette/environment i turned on "scene" and set the field of view to max. 180. to my surprise a kind of flare showed up above the skyplane (for which i had used a material without any reflectivity enabled), a result which i wanted to share with you.

- juandel

[Tag]

The reflections are looking great. I especially like the middle and the right ones, although the coloring and flare on the right could really change an image. I ope you post the finished image once you get the reflections worked out. The swirled landscape on the orignal is pretty cool looking.

[juandel]

thank you, Tami!

i did not want to spoil the beautiful original terrainthread with what i felt would get a lengthy quest for the reflections i’m after so i set up the original one quickly just to show a sketch of the scenery i am going for. if i am happy with my arbitrary results or am shown the 100%predictable superneatobanditoway to do z-water reflections i’ll post the final there

FYI: i did the swirled landscape by covering a stretched (via transformscale) copy of the front rock with 3d-rings. in the stroke-palette i changed from the default drag-rectangle to dotstroke and ploinkploinkploink: it’s raining rings!

the one below was done with material environment reflectivity set to max. and field of view to about 10 only.



- juandel

[Digits]

It's amazing to sit here and watch you work in your labratory up there in the Austrian Alps, I can almost hear the wolves howling at the moon, and your halfwitted assistant Igor shuffling about the room muttering to himself. "Master, Master"

No, really Some cool stuff happening here, some of which has helped me out alot, I bet it is that good beer that they have up there that gives you good pause for reflection.

[juandel]

Digits... but i’m afraid it’s vice versa: i’m spending my time at the monitor and look at it mentally challenged mumbling "water, water" while Igor reflects over mysterious fantasmagories drinking my precious beers with a mocking smile on his dramatically lit face... usually after about the 7th he’s howling like a wolf (foam all over his face) instead of shov(el)ing the snow (man! it snowed up there this time of the year already!) into the chasm in front of the laboratory. no worries... i’m an idiot and i’m used to it! thank you for not getting bored by my experiments until now, amigo!

tonite i found out, that i can make bad-fitting reflections both using environment-rendering and no environmentrendering at all. hooray!

this one

was done with render/modifiers/environment OFF (default). imho, the secret lies both in importing a vertically flipped texture into the materials texturemapslot and setting the light (sun at top) - and there was some tweaking done both in the reflectivity- and diffuse-graph. using a more proper and finshed texture could help a lot to improve the effect: the shading does not fit due to the fact that i mrgbz-grabbed it ante setting the light and it should be stretched and distorted in some way to affect the right portions of the perspectively distorted waves. mayhaps the stencil is the answer to do that. or it could be done via a 3d-plane or in photoshop...

same goes for this one:

this one was rendered with the material-environment reflect at 80 and the field of view at 75 ("normal" material reflectivity at 0, as far as i remember) and the render/modifiers/environment/texture ON... same unfinished texture as a map in there. slowly slowly i get behind the scheme of the "field of view"feature but seem unable to make it fit properly to the islands socket.

i sure wish to surprise howling Igor by hitting my head against the keyboard after learning a mucho simple way of doing what i am going for soonissimo... i bet, he’ll prefer to join the wolfs to hearing all the 4letterwords and agnostic swearing i’ll doubtlessly exclaim then

cheers
- juandel

[aurick]

Digits: "...pause for reflection"? What a horrid pun. I love it.

Juandel: Cool stuff happening there. You'll be the master of reflection, by the time you're done.

[juandel]

hahaha, aurick - reflection master : no way! the more i get into them reflections the less i understand them. here is a more traditional approach:

ok, dont look at the upper part - not finished and i’ll probably wont do it in the future too. i thought if i dont upload it tonite (after getting that far and having to go to bed now) i will not upload it at all... i just wanted to show a 2d-way to do reflections on water in zbrush in this thread, too: surface layer was mirrored and then, with mucho fumbling in the draw-window (mostly brushes with reduced height) and tools such as highlighterbrush, shading-enhancerbrush, blurbrush, smudge and simplebrush i got the displayed result (which resembles one of those horrible paintings displayed in way too many living- and hotel-rooms over here (well, they usually show a glacier in the back- and maybe a deer in the foreground - not a halfdone jungle))

- juandel

[Kathy]

Juandel that's beautiful!

This is actually scarey because I have an inlet behind the house, and during low tide (and no chop of course) it looks like this in the morning!!

NICE technique.

[banez]

yeah ill take a Zscript on making water AND Reflection all so.
i like these two pic http://www.cyber-webs.com/zbrush/junglewater.jpg

http://www.cyber-webs.com/zbrush/auricksandso.jpg

[juandel]

i apologize for not being able to contribute mucho at this time as i am super-busy these days... so many + wonderful pix and scripts to comment on! i hope you don’t mind that i used my scarce minutes off the job to do the following for Richard and EZ instead of commenting.

here is a zscript, in which i tried to redo the painterly version...
something re: colorization and certain placements seems to have gone wrong during the recording, but my script-skills are too meagre to cure it. anyway, i think you should get the basic idea of how i did the original one .

- juandel

edit as per march 2002: dont miss a fantastico tutorial b Stargo he posted into
this thread!!!