Introduction
This quick tutorial will walk you through creating a very simple, yet realistic, ocean shader. It will not require any plugins or any other extras and we'll construct everything using gradient maps so you won't even need a texture collection for the sky materials.
Requirements
- 3d Studio Max
- Brain
Background
If there's one thing that you take from this tutorial, it should be an understanding that water is highly reflective. It may sound stupid, but it's amazing how many people try to tweak their 'water texture' to make better water. The colouring of your water should be entirely absorbed from the surrounding environment, therefore if your water looks the wrong colour, it's the envrionment textures you need to change, not the water.
Step 1 - Create your Scene
- Create a big, flat plane (use plane or a box with 0.0 height)
- Create a skydome (just create a big geosphere/hemisphere that encapsulates your whole scene)
- Create a camera (use a target camera low down, pointing towards the centre of your water)
- Create some lighting (add a few omnis around your scene - place one on the horizon in front of the camera)
You should now have a scene something like this:
Step 2 - Create the sky
The sky in this scene is critical and will determine the colour of the water, so we need to spend a little time on this. You can, of course, do it any way you want, but I'd recommend just using a gradient ramp material and applying it to your skydome object.
Set the colours of your gradient to whatever sort of scene you envisage - deep blues for standard ocean, aquamarine blues for tropical, reds for sunsets etc...Here's the gradient that I came up with:
You can see I've chosen various deepening blues and a white colour (the white will be the horizon tint).
Feel free to play with your own setup (you can of course come back and try some variations once we've finished!)
You will also need to apply a planar UVW map to your skydome and position the gizmo to get the correct gradient for your scene - just keep rendering and previewing till it looks like the sky you imagined.
Step 3 - Texture the water
As discussed before the water should simply be a reflection, therefore we don't need a texture - so set a new map up with the following settings:
You'll note I've used absolute black as the colour and set a nice high specular and glossiness to give the water a sparkle.
All that remains is to add the reflection and the bump -Adding Waves
Add a noise map to the bump slot of this material.Make sure you set the noise map to:
- Noise Type: Fractal
- Size: 5 (you may need to tweak this to suit the scale of your own scene)
- Levels: 10
Adding reflection
Finally let's add some reflection to the water to transform it completely. It might be worth rendering your water now just so you can understand just how big a role the reflection plays in realistic water, it should be pretty black with maybe a little bit of white specular showingif you have a light positioned low in front of the camera.Click the 'none' slot next to 'reflection' and add a raytrace shader. Go back up a level and set the reflection amount to something like 70. This'll mean it doesn't act like a perfect mirror, water absorbs a little of the light and so is neraly always a darker shade.
Now render and marvel at your brilliant ocean!This water will also reflect any objects in the water nicely so there's nothing stopping you making a great-looking scene now!
Here's my quick render - I'm sure you can do better though. If you do come up with any variations, please email them to me so we can make begin to accumulate a collection of settings for everyone to easily reference!
Hope you enjoyed the tutorial and if there's anything you didn't understand or that you'd like to see in a future tutorial, just ask away in the forum.
