This tutorial continues on from where we left off in part 1. In part one we created an object that animates using the vibrate tag, sweep NURBS and a Mograph tracer object.

In this tutorial we will be creating our own material that will give our object that we created from part 1 the illusion of looking like water. We will be going over some basics of materials, shaders and displacement. This tutorial is a bit long but most of that is due to the number of screenshots. It really is a quick process and I can make this material in only a few minutes.

This is a beginner to intermediate level tutorial.

Previews

(HD Version)

The Flying Water Tutorial Part 2 of 3

We will pick up where we left off from part one. Lets start off with creating a new material.

By default Color and Specular are turned on and we will turn those off and enable Luminance. Under Luminance we need to apply a texture to it so click on the tab and apply a Fresnel.

The default is a basic black to white ramp. We want to change the gradient so we will click on the thumbnail and to get more options.

We are going to drag the white and black more to the center so we get a little bit thicker white silhouette.

Next we are going to turn on the transparency and change a few settings. For the color make sure it is pure white and then turn down the brightness to 0%. I know we are making water and in real life water’s refractive index is around 1.3 but for this effect I didn’t really like the amount of distortion it creates so I moved it down to 1.08. The rest we are going to leave the same and for a texture we are going to apply a layer. What the layer lets you do is mix shaders and and stack them much like you would stack layers in something like Photoshop.

So now lets click on the thumbnail for our new Layer and start adding shaders which you can access by clicking on that little button that says “Shader…”. Pretty complicated stuff right?

We are going to want to create 2 fresnels, 2 noise and a gradient shader. I have renamed these for organizational purposes. The layers with an “a” signifies that these layers will be animated.

For the top fresnel shader we are just going to swap the positions of the black and white swatches which should create a transparent center in your preview of the material.

Now if you click on the little arrow pointing up we can go back up a level to your Layers level with our collection of shader channels. We are going to copy and paste our inverted gradient from Fresnel 1 to Fresnel 2.

Our noise channels are going to create a cool light and shadow streaking in the water that I think enhance the look at there is some mass to to the material as opposed to looking kind of like an balloon. There isn’t anything really complicated here despite the number of options here. I switch the Space to UV (2D) and then change the scale so that it looks stretched vertically. I want this to be animated but nothing that will jump out at you so I change the Animation Speed to 0.1. If you leave it at 0 then there will be no animation. You can preview the way this channel will animate by right clicking on the preview and selecting Animate. The loop period tells when the animation should eventually loop so I just set it to 10 which is longer than the render for this project. I am finally going to change the low and high clip and raise the contrast so that I get a rid of the shades of gray and am left with only black and white. And done.

We are now going to go back to the Layer level and copy the Noise 1a channel we just created and paste it’s settings onto the Noise 2a channel. Then we will go into the Noise 2a channel and just change the seed so that while it is generating noise based on the same math, it is based off of a different seed number so we will get slightly different results.

Now onto Gradient 1a. Gradients look like fresnels if left at default but you can create some really nice distortion to it. For this shader channel I want a gradient from white to black to white with a little turbulence. I want the distortion to loop so I turn on cycle and the Frequency setting turns on the animation. Now we are done modifying all of our shader properties. Let’s go back to the Layers level and change the transfer modes because if you look at our material preview nothing has changed since we changed Fresnel 1.

Now change the transfer modes and opacity levels to what you see above. I am not going to go over what each transfer mode does because it works the same way as it does in Photoshop and I am assuming you already know what the different transfer modes do.

We will now move onto the Environment setting and apply a fresnel to it. I changed the gradient so that the material recieves a nice highlight on the sides and bottom.

We are now going to turn on the Alpha and apply another fresnel which we are just going to use to knock out some of the black lines we created in our Transparency.

Finally we are going to go into the displacement layer and apply a Noise shader. The displacement is going to give a physical turbulance to the object we apply this material to and you can see roughly how that is going to look in the material preview. I changed the noise type to Luka which creates a really nice look of disturbed water (it can also create cool looking world or moon terrain).  I really ramp up the global scale which reduces the number of spikes in our displacement. I then change the animation speed to 0.05 which may seem like not a lot but when paired with our moving sweeped spline object we are going to use is more than enough. Finally the last changes I make is to lower the high clip and raise the contrast to get rid of some the shades of grey and add a little more white to the noise.

Now lets put the final touches on this material by going back up to our Displacement settings. I change the Type to Intensity which will only extrude out the geometry while Intensity (Centered) will pull out anything above 50% gray and push in anything under 50% gray while 50% gray does nothing. We finally want to turn on Sub-Polygon Displacement which will create new points (more) to create smoother, more realistic deformation. If you leave this option off the displacement will still occur but only using the current points or vertices in your geometry.

Now we are done with our material.

I added this screenshot because when you look at the final material preview it can look like, well, a mess. If you want to use this material to create water that looks a lot calmer all you have to do is turn down the Strength on the displacement.

Now all you need to do is apply this to the object we created in our first project and we should a pretty nice looking stream of water flying around.

Now if you render you should get something that looks like this. This looks really good when you put something behind it and you can see the background bending and deforming in the water.

In the Part 3 we are going to be placing this in a very simple scene and make this flying water we have and turn it into a semi-solid shape which you can see in the preview. I will update this post soon with project files.

If you have any questions or comments please leave them in the comments section below and I will answer them as quickly as possible. Or if you have any suggestions for future tutorials you would like to see please head over to the about page and send me an email with your suggestion.