these are my expirments with making water int he material settings. i figured i could get some help and advice while making a sweet water material. here is what i have so far.
The first step is turning up the specularity and hardness. This is something that not many people newer to Blender bother with, but it is one of the most important things to making a material look realistic. Specularity is how much light from the lamps makes bright highlights on the material, and hardness is how focused the highlights are (how sharp). Next, water is usually pretty dark, not quite that beautiful blue, unless you are doing tropical water, but then you should be able to see the sand below and that leads to a whole other modeling and material situation. Also, a procedural texture should be applied to the water to make smaller ripples. The Stucci is probably the best. If you want I could send you the .blend file for this project I did.
I have been blending for quite some time, so I have a general jist of what is going on. but i agree with the speculity ajusment there are procedural texture on there it is justa really bad angle. I will upload a updated one probally tomorrow.
heres a better version. i used textures, color ramps and specularity ramps. also a better model for showing the material.
You should light it up more.
and to be honest, you won’t get good looking water without a better sky to reflect
hmm, good point. ill try that and see what i can do.
ok heres how it turned out. still needs some adjusting.
Looking pretty good, there.
Try adding a medium/small clouds normal map to give it more variation.
DwarvenFury