Water - Liquid improvements

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  • The liquid filter is cool and I really like how it moves when you move, however there are a few adjustments that I think would improve it greatly:

    • Add colour - Occasionally I want to show wine in a glass rather than water, or coffee in a mug, or have a darker tint to show deep water.
    • Edge refraction - slider for the amount of convex/concave bend at the edge of a water texture; in a glass bend one way, puddle spill bend the other.
    • Slider for density - How close the 'waves' are; small and it looks rougher with wind, large and it is smooth on a windless day.
    • Slider for wave height - Ocean waves or storm in a tea-cup
    • Animation - Set a direction, speed and have the ripples move constantly in that direction; ocean waves to flowing river to mill-pond calm.
    • Special animation: Rain - Set size and density for random concentric rings on the surface of water.


    Would be better if these were set per texture rather than a global

  • The water material is far too basic, it looks like a an oil slick when close to parallel.

    please add options for reflections, colour, translucency, bump, noise pattern, a few types of water, river, lake, ocean, shoreline (wave action)

    check out some of the game engines to see how they deal with it. Crysis has incredible breaking waves in their engine.

    • Official Post

    Gadget  DC8Studio thank you both for the suggestions! They have been added to our agenda. ;)

  • looking at a couple of recent renders, it would be really cool if you could see the reflected moving sunlight on vertical surfaces that touch water (like you would see on the sides of boats, under bridges or the edges of a swimming pool)

    eg

    https://goo.gl/images/gCwr5g

    https://goo.gl/images/Xa9bpA

    (i have been in swimming pools with cool sunlight patterns playing on the walls & ceilings, but can't find an appropriate image)

  • What you mean is commonly refered to as above water caustics. Thanks for proposing, we will check the feasibility.

  • I agree - you guys are awesome: The new update to water with the latest release has given some cool additional options on how the surface is displayed and a real sense of depth too :thumbsup:


    ... I understand that it's still a preview release but ...


    - The colour of the water is not linked to the colour of the material in the native application

    - The colour set in the Enscape material window is really washed out for shallow volumes - still can't use it for red wine (it's even hard to get a nice yellow for 'white wine' since it seems to add blue to the mix and give a green tint,)

    - The opacity has no effect.

    - (I'm not sure how I feel about the intersecting edges of a water texture and it's container fading to nothing - it is a fantastic solution to obscure the fact that the edges don't move with the waves and is much better than the static line that breaks realism, but...)


    ...and some more wishlist items...

    • To improve the washed out appearance in small/shallow volumes I think that there should be a user adjusted variable for the scale of the 'fade out depth'; how close to the surface you see full colour saturation.
    • I would like to see the opacity work like a "Fog"; geometry seen through the surface fades and becomes more obscure the further it is from the surface. 100% opaque/black would not let you see anything through the liquid. 50%/grey would be ocean depths. 0%/white would be crystal clear waters.
    • I remember that water used to look like it cast some of the cool underwater light caustics; it would be nice to project these onto surfaces that are hit by light passing through a water plane. On a similar note 'light rays' from the surface go hand-in-hand with caustics and would be really amazing, but for the once in a blue-moon use I can't imagine they would be worth development time.
    • I don't know how, but it would be really cool if, when Enscape found two 'water' textures next to each other it blended the settings between the two.


    (Just to repeat the other things noted in the first post that have not yet been implemented: )

    • Edge refraction - slider for the amount of convex/concave bend at the edge of a water texture; in a glass bend one way, puddle spill bend the other. {This would also add a line to the join between an intersecting water plane and it's container ... which would have to move with the waves or break the realism}
    • Special animation: Rain - Set size and density for random concentric rings on the surface of water)
  • Thanks for your feedback, Gadget. So far, the water is only designed to work on more or less horizontal surfaces (ocean, pool, rivers). It's not designed to be used in bottles. I recommend using a traditional alpha surface for water which is not an open surface.

    Currently, a white water color describes a clear water. Naturally, even "crystal clear" water absorbs colors which makes it look cyan. On the one hand, Enscape does not allow to create a liquid other than water, on the other hand it's easy to match the real world's water absorption parameters by using something close to white.

  • I was trying to use it in glasses rather than bottles;

    - if it's a glass of water the refraction works well and does actually look like a glass of water (a little bit of strangeness with straight edges going around a curve, but close enough.) if it's a glass of wine it looks like weak dilute squash.


    If I use glass for the liquid I then have the problems associated with glass looking through glass looking through glass (etc) {BTW still annoying that glass doesn't throw shadows: the bottle isn't floating, it's just that only the label and top are casting a shadow.}

  • Hello, can I please request to add this cool functionality to modify the water parameters (.e.g water color, wave height ...), also in the other plugins especially Rhino?


    https://enscape3d.com/best-practice-for-water-in-architectural-design/


    I'm a ship designer, and having the possibilites to get something, looking somehow like seawater would be just greaaatttt.


    An alternative workaround would be adding watermaterials (pool upto seawater), similar to the skybox selection?


    Thanks in advance

  • Workaround: create a water plane, create a ground plane at the right depth. The water color can't be changed, but you could tint the ground material.


    Here a test where I used a stone-moos texture.


    Maybe a first little step for a better implementation would be if the transparency color of the water material would be supported.



  • I am 110% behind having a seascape horizon/skybox available from the preset drop-down.


    The underwater caustics have been applied but only work looking through the surface and seem to work inverse to reality: the lighter mesh pattern does not lighten the 'underwater' surface, it just darkens the patches in-between.

    It also remains in the same place as the sunlight moves, making it look even more like it's on the surface rather than under the water (and just vanishes abruptly when the sun has dipped over the horizon). The caustic pattern seems to be mapped (not quite) vertically rather than tangent to the sun's position.


    You also have to be careful that *both* sides of a water plane are transparent (or filled with the same water) or you will get no shadows cast by the sun onto your underwater geometry.


    (If light passing through transparent materials was tinted/lightened according to the settings then it would add massively to the realism of water.)

  • the lighter mesh pattern does not lighten the 'underwater' surface, it just darkens the patches in-between.

    Water acts like a lens here, it takes from some areas (darks) and puts it onto others.


    Enscape does not support the camera being under water since often times, the water volume is not enclosed. Mostly it's just a plane.

    The water color can't be changed, but you could tint the ground material.

    That's because water usually has no tint, all real world "waters" are completely transparent when sufficiently thin. A tint would still be there after 1mm. The color you see on seas & oceans is created by the water's absorption which in turn can be specified in Enscape.

  • Enscape does not support the camera being under water since often times, the water volume is not enclosed. Mostly it's just a plane.

    I understand that, however I think that it would both look better from looking through the surface and it would allow the viewer to 'explore' underwater. (and allow for things like viewing windows in a pool, fish tanks, glass bottom boats, ...)

    That's because water usually has no tint, all real world "waters" are completely transparent when sufficiently thin. A tint would still be there after 1mm. The color you see on seas & oceans is created by the water's absorption which in turn can be specified in Enscape.

    Yes, but we want things to look realistic without having to model everything as it would be in reality: The ideal would be to have everything look as natural as possible (given what was modelled), but then to use "artistic licence" and cheat so that we can add a specific tint to make it look how we want (... which may not be the same thing as looking realistic.)

  • I have been facing some problems with the water material while trying to make a pool with glass sides in sketchup.

    • In this image all the sides of the pool have water material assigned to both the front face and the back face, which led to having blue sides on the left and right.


    • Here i changed the back faces of both the left and right sides to sketchup default material instead of water. That resulted to having opaque white sides.

    So i was wondering if anyone knows a possible workaround or a certain technique that could fix that problem and make it look more realistic :).....


                      


    • I also faced another glitch with the water material when i simply moved the edge of this pool a bit to the left, It suddenly became very reflective. Any ideas why??

    Thank you :)

  • In this image all the sides of the pool have water material assigned to both the front face and the back face, which led to having blue sides on the left and right.

    These are full boxes with planes on all 6 sides...

    (the ones with "glass" on the sides have a glass plane 5mm off-set from the liquid plane)



  • Gadget Thank you for your time and effort :)... But i am more interested in the water/water or water/glass workflow because they are transparent. Unlike the water/default that turns the sides opaque, which is not physically correct... I am trying to reach a workflow that is physically correct and shows how water would behave in reality. So your demonstration actually proves that my concern is not resolved yet. :)

  • It looks like there's a bug. We will investigate that issue!


    EDIT: Gadget, your water project seems to show the issue nicely. Could you send it to support@enscape3d.com? That'd be awesome! Thanks.