I’m having trouble creating a decent water shader for this swampy scene. Nothing too fancy, just still water with a bit of fresnel, some ripples, and maybe a bit murky where not fully reflective. What I have at the moment is principled (set to rough metallic) mixed with a translucent shader which is a bit crazy. A fresnel node was giving me far too sharp a transition so I ditched it. Water was a plane aobut 0.3m above a ground layer. I extruded it to a volume but didn’t help much. Is volume better than plane in this situation? I’m using Cycles for rendering.
I once saw something making a water shader by using the glass shader (using the IOR for water… ) mixing with transparency… was very simple… of course i can’t find it now
Thanks, I did try that but ended up using a Principled BSDF mixed with a Transparent BSDF because I could use a bump node with noise texture to create ripples. Glass doesn’t have that option. However I couldn’t get the Fresnel effect to work satisfactorily, or perhaps I was just viewing the water at too great an angle (to the normal) to see the transition anyway.
Actually if I’m careful and get the light right it does work with the Fresnel node.
For anyone interested here it a blend file with the water material and a simple scene set up to demonstrate it. It uses a volume (cube) for the water rather than a plane. Volume Absorption makes it a bit murky. It includes a CC0 HDRI from Polyhaven for lighting. Thanks guys.
water.blend (2.5 MB)