Underwater Light Refraction Effect (3Delight)

Mage 13X13

Hi, everybody. I come to you here to see if anybody knows how to make a certain type of lighting effect in DAZ Studio for the 3Delight Render Engine. I have begun doing a lot of underwater images recently, but I cannot get the lighting effect to work, that helps make it look like it is underwater.

My AttemptsThus Far

1. I made a texture that is 2048 x 2048 i Bryce 7.1 Pro, by setting the render size to those dimensions, using the top down view setting and zoomed out to get some height for that view. I loaded an imfinite plane, and used a Turbulent Sea Water with Foam material on it. I set the Sunlight altitude angle to 39 degrees. I then rendered that and saved the render in .jpg format.

In DAZ Studio, I created a primitive plane, 20 yards on each side, and loaded the image from Bryce onto it. I placed a grayscale version of the Bryce render in the Opacity channel in the Surfaces Edit Pane, and the color version in the Diffuse channel. I created a Distant Light and set it at -39 degrees, and 130% intensity. I left the color of the light white, as the color of the texture should be what adds color to the light. After several version of the Opacity channel image was tried, the only thing that happened was a change in the overall color of the light.

2. I loaded a plasma effects shader onto a primitive plane in DAZ Studio, which looks a lot like what I want and tiled it up to 20 vertically and horizontally. I then duplicated the primitive plane and rotated the duplicate, to fix the look to appear random. First of all, the tiling defeats the random look, and second, it looks tiled no matter how it is rotated. The render did not change the light color, nor did any refraction effect appear on the underwater surfaces.

So the two above trials were complete failures, and I am now out of ideas for creating this effect. I need help in the form of a tutorial that will produce the effect I am trying to achieve. I found a photo to show what I am wanting to do, which I shall attach here. If anybody knows how to do this in DAZ Studio for the 3Delight Render Engine, I would appreciate instructions that explain it step by step. Assume that I am a new user of DAZ Studio, even though I have been using it for 13+ years, and I know a lot about it. There may be a procedure that is unclear to me if details that are important are left out. If you have links to tutorials, please post them here.

Now I will attach the photo showing the effect I want to achieve.

Sven Dullah

 

 

Richard Haseltine

You could use your existing imaeg as the gobo - take it into an image editor and adjust levels, or if need be curves, to make most of it near white and the actual caustic lines near black (so the lins let the light through and the areas between don't).

Charlie Judge

This product is for 3DL and appears to have underwater caustics:

https://www.daz3d.com/ultrumarine-ocean

AgitatedRiot

Charlie Judge said:

This product is for 3DL and appears to have underwater caustics:

https://www.daz3d.com/ultrumarine-ocean

Stop making me buy things. 

Mage 13X13

Thanks Charlie. I just put that one in my wishlist, as it is exactly what I am looking for. I still wish to learn how to do it myself. 

Charlie Judge said:

This product is for 3DL and appears to have underwater caustics:

https://www.daz3d.com/ultrumarine-ocean

Mage 13X13

I do have PD Howler 12, which can do that type of image editing. I will look into it and see how well it works. One the patches are near white, and the lines are black or dark grey, plugging the image into the Opacity channel should give me what I want. I will try it with the tilable Plasma image that is in on of the shaders I have. The hope is that it won't look so tiled. I'l use duplicates of the plane I create to tile the image differently on each, and stack them to see how it works.  Then I'll render the initial setup to create my texture image, and open that rendered image in PD Howler to make the adjustments. Once that is done, I will import the image into the opacity channel in Surfaces/Edit on one plane. Put my light above and angled down at the plane, bring my camera underneath that and render the scene, It might just give me something good enough to use.

Thanks, Richard.

Richard Haseltine said:

You could use your existing imaeg as the gobo - take it into an image editor and adjust levels, or if need be curves, to make most of it near white and the actual caustic lines near black (so the lins let the light through and the areas between don't).