CompuServe Messages

I made some water animations in 3DS and with RayMan. If the water doesn`t flow and you have to look through the water: make a plane with GRID, apply a (animated) bump map. Make the material very transparent, give it a (extreme) little touch of blue and make it a little bit reflective. Under the water plane place an other plane with a ground mapping (ocean ground or a ground of a swimming pool or whatever you want). You should make the ground mapping with a warping program like Elastic Reality. Than render a sequence of distorted images and use them as an animated ground mapping. Then you should use a projector light with the caustic flic to illuminate your ground mapping. This works fine for a lot of jobs. If you want really perfect water you need realistic refractions and multi reflections. You need a raytracer like RayMan (<g>)! You should buy RayMan (the 3D Studio raytracer). If you have it make the following additional to the things described above: give the water material a nice reflection map (for e.g. a sky). Then load the material into the RayMan material editor and set the REFLECTION MAP RATIO to 0.5. That means that RayMan reflects 50% of the reflection map and 50% of the 3D scene. Set the INDEX OF REFRACTION to 1.333 (or higher). Hope this gaves you some little tips… Michael