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New Caustic Tests

Caustics from tests to finally getting the caustics to work with default global illumination so it is still way to bright to function correctly. This is a plane with a total face count under 100 used to create the water.

This was the first test originally attempting to use image based lighting to give the caustic feel which did not work out so well.

With render settings changed a bit and modification of the physical sun and sky attributes.

Caustics with mia_material adding a lot more realism to the water but not completely giving the full affects desired.

Added the mia_material to a mib_transparency node which gave a beautiful affect, now it is just to bright to give a real feel.

The two previous version photshoped together to get more of a desired look i was hoping for.

Next step of water Project

To give the water a realistic feel the next step of the water process involves HDRI imaging and caustics lighting in Maya Mental Ray. I have only found a few tutorials most of the good material in hard reference. Progress update soon.

New images for water tests inside hot springs enviroment

These are the newest renders with all the hypershade problems fixed but still with the absence of lighting and rendering (just using all defaults from MR settings in Maya.) The texture pack for the hot springs rock formation itself is also not the final version in which will not looked all stretched on the side surfaces of the structure. After the ambient inclusion render and the lines in the top image will no longer exist.

Water pet project

This version is not very well rendered or lite and i do apologize but i wanted to at least make sure you could get some sense of what was accomplished. These pictures consist of the hypergraph networks used to create this new type of water and also the water before and after rendering.

 

SamplerInfo Node and Facing Ratio addition

To give the clear affect of water and how it would act in a real life situation i wanted to make sure that depending on what angle you viewed the water from depicted to the camera how the water was perceived. In order to achieve this affect a few things needed to occur. Firstly i had to develop two separate texture packages both relatively similar but still different in some aspects such as color and transparency most importantly. After creating these two seperate packages one of which is below(the only thing differing from the other package is some change to transparency a little tweak in color and the weight that the two textures are given). When these two separate packages are created you can then apply them to a simple ramp with three or so colors depending on the depth you want to achieve. The ramp is run on a value system from 0-1 like a lot of things in Maya. 0 being at the top of the ramp and 1 being at the bottom, you can use these integers to tell the camera what to render. 0 renders everything facing the camera with the texture pack you created for the color at the top of the ramp, while 1 renders the polygons which normals are not facing the camera with the other texture package you applied to the color at the bottom of the ramp.

Finally believe it has been developed.

After spending so much time on this i can almost understand the argument of why game creators do create water in the manner that the do. I have yet to get the Level of Detail Node to work completely along with the facing ratio node. This will allow the water to be at the perfect amount of detail and retain the correct visual properties completely based off of where the plane is being viewed from. I have however managed to resolve the biggest issue of the random looping of the geometry through the displacement map animation. Two simple things had to occur for this to happen. First if you animate a fractal you can go into its properties of animation and you must change the post and pre infinity to cycle with offset. After this you must set a new expression on the animated time for the fractal. This MEL script is very simple...Nameofobject.translateX=rand(0.5) this allows the x value of the translation that occurs due to the fractal randomizing the geometry of the plane to pick random integers between 0-.5 everytime the animation is restarted. You can then repeat the process if the object is also animating the geometry on the Y or Z axis. 

Part of the hypershade for one texture pack for the facing ratio when it is directly viewed from the top view.