followed some of a tutorial for the water. then i went out on my own and changed the water to my liking. i think the water is pretty much done, but now i need a horizon and improve the boat.
As a start for improving the boat you might consider simply adding a bevel to the edges. The water looks great, you might want to apply some white foam to the top of the waves for that extra added depth of realism. The sky is way too saturated and cyan though. You probably need to tone it down and perhaps add something in the sky for the water to reflect. Great job.
Yeah, i would definitely recommend going to the blender world material settings and getting a horizon and sky color set for the world and then using the blend button and if you want a horizon use the real button with it. This will very quickly give you an infinite horizon you can test render with. As far as the cloud plane, it might have worked but it didn’t for a few reasons, if it wasn’t close enough to the water then the water wouldn’t have picked it up and it also probably needed to be set as shadeless, transparent, and maybe a little bit of emit on it so that the sky light would still go through it. Just a thought.
Have a look at that. Notice how there are many different ‘levels’ of disturbance. You have tiny ripples, small ripples, medium ripples, and large ripples, then you can get into waves, wake, etc…
I would create a cloud map and sharpen it, then scale it down. Then just repeat that step, only make this map a little bigger, and another one a little bigger and so on.
erm…
yeah…
i’m going for a calmish sea, not a storm, you know?
anyways, HUGE update. i’ve completely changed the water. on my own. i like it, what do you think?
still might want to desaturate that sky a little bit, add some contrast, the blue in the image just looks unnatural. Excellent job on tweaking the ocean looks good, you could also use particles to create the foam coming off of the boat’s wake.
Are you using procedural within Blender, or are you importing an image file? The basic idea is to get Blender to read alpha values there are a couple of ways to do this. If you are importing or creating a procedural texture in Blender then you can actually create RGBA alpha simply by ticking the alpha box or the use alpha box in the textures dialog. If you are saving from Photoshop or some other program just make sure to save in 32 bit mode and save with an image format that supports transparency like TGA or PNG. In Blender if you are creating a procedural texture with say clouds or something, you can go into the colorband tab inside the texture and make sure that the color on the left is black and all the way transparent and the color on the right is white and the alpha is all the way up. Then when you apply this texture to your material in blender all you have to do is go the map to tab and uncheck col (for color) and check alpha and it will take out all of the transparent parts.