I’m trying to create a lake scene, but I’m having trouble with the water. If the water is a plane, then something at the bottom of the lake (such as the terrain at the bottom of the lake) is just as visible as something just under the surface.
I used a cube instead, with a cloud normals texture on the top. From the wiki, I gathered that adjusting the falloff and limit should give this kind of effect, however, I’ve been playing with these settings for over an hour with absolutely NO visible change in my render. I have raytracing turned on, everything is set to receive transparent shadows, but no matter what I do, an object that is deep in the water is just as visible as one near the surface. Any suggestions?
note I’ve successfully demonstrated those settings with a simpler setup. It seems that the transparency is only varied among surfaces that lie outside of the transparent object (light enters AND exits trans object before hitting scene object). If this is correct, I would have to shrinkwrap the bottom of my lake object to the terrain. However, this would dramatically increase my scene’s poly count. I’m sure there’s a better way to accomplish this…