3D
Max - Simple Water Surface
Introduction
...
One
of the few things that make 3D graphics look fake,
is that one of the goals of the designer is to make
it look as real as possible. When he uses 3D rendering
programs, he tries to recreate an environment that
most people already has first-hand experience with.
Organic shapes and objects often look unrealistic,
and that is where the software has been catching up
the latest years.
For
creating humans and the like, you have metaballs.
Plants and trees can be created with fractal programs,
and atmospheric effects, such as rain or fog, has
been implemented in most 3D packages. But the one
thing that is causing trouble is how to create water.
Most solutions imply using ray tracing and ripple/wave
effects. But 3D Studio doesn't have RT, so you'll
have to find another way.
Ok..one
of the obstacles is how MAX creates reflections. Basically,
it renders various images that are mapped onto the
object, thus creating reflection. This is both good
and bad. Good, because it is faster than RT, and bad
because it isn't that accurate. You have two different
kinds of reflection; flat and non-flat. The flat is
for mirrors and the like, while non-flat is for rounded
objects, such as spheres. So, for a water-surface,
which do I use? The flat reflection looks good if
you're just out to have a nice calm pond. But once
you want ripples and waves, you'll need something
else. The non-flat reflection (called Reflect/Refract
in MAX) can do this to a certain degree. A non-flat
reflection on a flat surface will look bad; it will
be terribly blurred and won't show much. So you'll
need either a space-warp to create ripples or waves,
or you'll need a bump map. Here is a quick walk-through
on how to create simple water surface with the standard
maps in the 3D Studio MAX materials editor, without
using ripplse/wave effects. This is a way of doing
it with a material. Bear in mind that this is not
an accurate way of creating water, and will probably
not look good in all scenes. After experimenting with
it, it seems that you'll have the bet result when
using it in a scene consisting of a landscape, such
as a pond.
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