Graphics Programs Reference
In-Depth Information
Creating a clean running water material
The simpler way to make a water shader is by using a glass node and setting the
IOR
value (
Index Of Refraction
, a number specifying the capacity of a medium to
refract the light passing through it) to
1.33
, and actually, this should be enough; by
the way, although physically correct, this does not work well in every light condition or
particular situation. A better approach is to use the glass shader mixed with another
"specularity" node and, in some cases, also with the aid of a texture.
Getting ready
1. Start Blender and switch to the Cycles rendering engine. Select the cube
and scale it at least six units on the z axis (press
S
followed by
Z
, digit
3
,
and hit
Enter
; the default cube is already of 2 units, so 2 X 3 = 6). Then
scale down to the half its width (press
S
followed by
Shift
+
Z
, digit
0.500
,
and hit
Enter
).
2. Go in edit mode, and press
Crtl
+
R
and scroll the middle mouse wheel to
add four horizontal cuts to the cube.
3. Select the upper and the bottom faces and delete them (press
X
and go
to
Faces
). Go out of edit mode and set the cube smooth (press
T
to bring
up the
Object Tools
panel on the left and press the
Smooth
button under
Shading
).
4. Press
Crtl
+
A
and select
Scale
to apply the new size of the cube as ori-
ginal.
5. Go to the
Object Modifiers
window and assign a
Subdivision Surface
modifier, set the
Subdivision
levels to
6
.
6. Add a
Displace
modifier. Click on the
Show textures in texture tab
but-
ton, the last to the right of the
Texture
slot; this switches to the
Tex-
tures
window. Click on
New
and then change the
Size
value of the default
Clouds
texture to
0.50
. Back to the
Object Modifiers
window, set the
displacement strength to
0.500
.
