Tips for best render of sea water

[brejcha.viktor]

Hi my Keyshot friends,
do you have any tips how to make best/most realistic sea water? My water still looks to "plastic".

Thank you for any tips or textures!

Viktor

[INNEO_MWo]

Maybe it would help if you share your existing results? So we can help to find the right solution?!

[mattjgerard]

Lighting.

Lighting.

aaaaannnndd then lighting.

That's the one area that I am trying to focus on. It took me a while to understand why, with all the preset materials that were physically accurate, complicated, and tweaked to perfection as to why my scenes weren't looking as good as the stuff I was seeing coming from others. So, I dived into materials and got a solid grasp on those, but now I know that honestly, its more lighting than materials. You should be able to have a simple diffuse material look really good, but to do that you need to know what you are trying to do with the lighting. Will gave me the task of picking a model, texture it with a flat diffuse texture, and then light it 5 different ways with custom made HDRI's to give it 5 totally different looks.

That is where I am working on now, and that is where I see a lot of effort going into these awesome realistic scenes is in the lighting.

[INNEO_MWo]

Matt's right. You'll see many differences if you use an environment with sun & sky or a HDRI with sunset colors or clouds or a simple gradient from white to light blue.