In this Tutorial I want to show you the approach of creating realistic water.

Softimage XSI 3.01

"How to create perfect water"

(c) by Garry Runke 2003

www.garryrunke.com

This tutorial is about how you give your water the look you want and renders way faster than the XSI ocean shader.

Hope you enjoy creating your own ocean. If you have further questions or anything else, feel free to ask.

PART I – know the rules

As you are about to read this tutorial on how to create really cool water, you probably want to learn a bit about water behaviour first.

Here are several pics of oceans. I refer here mainly to oceans, but this tutorial can also be used to create lakes or anything else.

What do we see on the pics? Water reflects, yeah well, I guess you knew that .. but look at the next pic.

I scribbled you the typical layout of an ocean water over it. You can see huge waves and on the huge waves, a couple of small waves.

That's the whole trick. That was easy wasn't it? It's the ratio of the huge waves to the small waves that makes an ocean, a lake, a stormy day, a sunny day, whatever.

A rough windy ocean would have 1 huge wave and at least 8 small waves on it.

A lake would have 1 huge wave on 1 small wave, or no huge waves at all, sometimes not even small waves, then it's a mountain lake. Or a place where no wind blows.

Water is also a little bit transparent. But that depends on many things. Normally you don't have to make this shader transparent. Only in close-ups. But this shader is nothing for close-ups. You would also have the problems of wakes. But that's a way other story.

Now you can look at some pics of lakes, normally very reflective.