After a computer crash (no backups of course :o) and an all to long period of little blenerizing (games are way to addictive these days…) i have decided to remake and extend on one of my older works (http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=112394)
anyway… before you get bored here’s some renders :yes:
C&C would be appreciated, especially on the water
Water looks a little oily to my eyes have you tried differen’t Fresnel and refraction settings ?
apart from that nice work
hmmm… i’ll play around with the Fresnel a little… i never did find out what it actually did :o
The “natural” values are a freshnel of 5 and a factor of 1.25, though i don’t always find them pleasing 
thanks Guiseppe - that will be useful.
meanwhile more updates on the boat:
Edit:
more on the water in the previous post - do you think it looks like its interacting with the boat enough? [wake etc]
I think the wake is too high, it needs froth, not height! It should be sharper as well, especially close to the boat. That said, I’m impressed with your sail rigging (the ropes) They look great! It never ceases to amaze me how a simple small detail like that, when it is well done, can up the realism of a pic tenfold, even on such a simple model. My latest fun has come from hdri maps, using one might give that water the reflections you are after.
yea i was looking into using cube-mapping techniques for the water a while ago… unfortunately i could not find out how to map a cube map to a material (also all the documentation for environment mapping is from like 5 years ago…) - i’ll look into these HDRI maps, hopefully it will help a lot with the water.
I have been playing with froth on the wake but it always looked fake - a frothy material is really hard to achieve, i might try mucking around with particles for a bit. Laser’s also tend not to produce much wake (they have a really shallow draught ):http://www.canadiandesignresource.ca/officialgallery/wp-content/uploads/2006/05/laser_canadian_design.jpg
I’ve started blocking out a sailor to sail the boat:
As you can probably tell organic modeling is not my strong point :o… so any hints would be greatly appreciated - especially about topology as I’m going to need to rig this…
I think your ropes look too stiff. Maybe should make them soft bodies or something (maybe this helps: http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=134002)
The water looks ok too me - though it seems very calm.
Good luck and lots of fun!
Just a small update, I’ve been playing around with the water - i think this should look’s better, though it still seems to oily, which, i think is because it isn’t reflecting the sky… is there a way of mapping an image to the full 360 degrees of world (aka a cubemap :D)
Edit:
on looking at hdri maps as N00bie suggested it seems that these may do the job fine - anyone know where i can get some? (preferably free…)
…anyone…?
