Making a character appear made out of water
TheWheelMan
Posts: 1,014
Has anyone tried this, and if so, did it look convincing? Trying to figure out whether a water shader alone is enough, or will it look more like glass than water?
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It really is a combination of water shader and camera angle. I've done a few renders with characters being half into water, and lights, camera-angle & water shader has to play together. For me, it was just a lot of trial and errors, mostly errors, until I got it right.
You would need a shader that is creating waves too ... or else it just looks like crystal ...
There are several "water props" with waves in different stores, but a good bump or normal map would do it.
Just spitballing, but maybe you could take a pre-existing water prop with shader and parent it to your figure (with smoothing modifiers) and set you original figure opacity to 0?
I think the OP means "Make it look like a character is COMPOSED of water", not is manifesting out of a pool or lake...
I did this in Reailty 2.5 using the water surface preset
Correct, although I am actually envisioning a character made of water emerging from a lake.
You know, I forgot that Reality has a water shader preset built in. I may have to experiment with that. I also have some wavy water shaders that I can try.
it needs to be pulling the lake surface up a bit with it and blending in as one mesh to look really convincing.
I would be inclined to export an obj posed minus the inner mouth and eyes (hide in scene tab ( and fill in the empty eye polygon in your modeler of choice), slice off the torso and join it to a plane, meshmxer by Autodesk can do the latter and is free if you do not want to fuss with modeling much, then pull up the figures vertices a bit (or pull down the plane) uv map it all with one uv prob spherical.
Meshmixer also good in that you can pull out spurts and ripples too or paint them on as extruded mesh like sculptris or I believe Zbrush, the term I believe is voxel modeling.
Like playdough.
Someone posted a thread a few months back wanting to know how to make dripping "ooze" people and provided a couple pics from some sort of anime. That would be interesting to see. I don't know how you could make a figure "drip" though. That would be quite the accomplishment. Maybe artfully colliding water props against the figure?
cross post, just added exactly how to do the drips and spurts!
Actually, my thoughts are that many of these things could be accomplished with postwork. The biggest thing is to be able to visualize how it should look.
I highly recommend Sculptris alpha if we're going for the "export the OBJ" method. Very easy and intuitive to make organic things like drips and spurts.
I played with the parameters for the ripple of the water on the mat zones of Genesis, more rippled at the legs, less so up top.
Reality's water pseudo-material is setting up a glass2 volume with Pope97 data for the absorption of water (when you select the Sea/Pool water option) and a procedural noise displacement map with strength based on the 'Ripple amount' setting. You might have more luck simply selecting glass and creating your own displacement/normal maps, since you'll have exact control over them. Set the IOR to 1.33 to approximate water with a blue tint for the glass colour (or hack the generated scene file to use the Pope97 absorption data).
While not water, I've done a couple crystalline figure renders with Lux. The principal is the same, just with a higher IOR and clear colour instead of water absorption. See Crystalline Timekeeper 002, for example.
Way back in the Past I did this in DS3A with a V4. It is doable much better in DS4.5+ now. I might need to revisit the Idea. This one looks a bit odd to me so I never went farther with the idea. View full size to see the Translucency in effect.
...been getting close but can't seem to get rid of the tongue and teeth. Can't delete them as that deletes the entire figure.
Try setting them to 0 opacity.
...the shaders I was using (Metallised Glass Shaders) overrode that particular parameter so it wasn't available. I tried flagging them to not appear in the final render but that didn't work either.
...thanks, I ll try that. One of the "partial" shaders in this set is "water" which is the one I have been working with.
Another option: switch to the polygon group editor and toggle the mouth/etc mat zones invisible. This is, unfortunately, not saved so you have to re-do this whenever you reload the figure. (If the figure is TriAx, a workaround is to select the faces in the desired mat zones and then use the 'assign auto-hide faces' (or whatever the exact name is) to a primitive that you have fit to the figure in question and then hide the primitive in the scene list.)
I leave the inner body parts, tongue, mouth, etc at the default daz shader and set the opacity to 0. I think this has always worked for me. Could be instances where not. I do know that some other shader types even with opacity 0 would still render.
I had a similar idea a while back for a water guardian...
...again. the shader I am using overrides the opacity channel by removing it from the surfaces tab. Once I apply the shader, the setting defaults back to 100%.
...again. the shader I am using overrides the opacity channel by removing it from the surfaces tab. Once I apply the shader, the setting defaults back to 100%.Hide ALL except the Inner mouth parts use the Polygon Group Editor to SELECT all the inner mouth parts then do HIDE, turn rest of model back on. Now in Polygon Group Editor do Delete Hidden. Pop no mouth parts, now apply your Shader and save as Scene or scene Subset. You may need to Open the mouth to get at the inner mouth but it is doable this way.
The last promotional image on this shader set appears to give a 'The Abyss'-like effect to make figures fluidic.
http://www.daz3d.com/pweffect
Anyone tried it? The same vendor's 'pwGhost' was excellent for creating ghosts with, I found (with a specific automated techniques for hiding teeth, tongue and so forth), along with holograms, X-rays and so forth. If 'pwEffect' is of the same quality, I'd be tempted to purchase it, myself.
I have it and I have even Used it. I have so many shaders I forget which do what.
Could you post an example with that... Watery-type option? Or whatever it's officially called in the pack. :)
If it's anything like 'pwGhost', it should be able to get recoloured from turquoise to any colour desired.
Opps I wondered off. Sorry give me a few...
Here is 4 of the presets that come with it... from right to left is, Crackling Pink, Epileptic Sprit, Gaseous Ghoul and Phantom. And the effects are 100% editable so Water should be easy to set up with time.