Water test: bump/displacement - glass/bsdf

Join me in my great water shader test in a cave I made lately :smiley:

I am searching for the best-looking one, so I contest bump vs displacement and BSDF vs Glass Shader. Surprisingly, the results vary. I am also trying to pick the simplest yet best possible, searching for the most processing friendly method.

Feel free to add any further suggestions, e.g. how to add Light Path, Reflection, etc… nodes for even better results, and tell me your opinions, which would you go for.

(I know the water should be more like still, but I use these textures to provide more seeming results.)

Feel free to add any suggestions for further methods to check :slight_smile:

All bsdf is 100 Transmission, 0.400 gray SSS at 0.05 or 0.10 (forgot lol) with R 0.075 G 0.100 B 0.125 values.
Glass colour is 0.900 gray, Mix factor with Transparent 0.300.

  1. Pond bump + bsdf

  2. Pond disp + bsdf

  3. Pond bump + glass

  4. Pond disp + glass

  5. Pond bump + disp + bsdf

  6. Pond bump + disp + glass

Here is the setup, all connected, of course I used either this or that, or a mix of the methods through the Glass - Roughness and Normal.

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This is great! I prefer the disp. It looks more natural. I would just separate texture coordinate nodes and add two separate empties as objects moving in opposite directions for animation

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Hi there, thanks for the comment. Indeed, there is a lot to tweak. I am actually not thinking in animation, only still renders, however that is a nice tip!

One thing I notice, looking back, is that the Glass shader is too clean, while the Transmission type is too dirty :smiley: So maybe something in between. A little darker gray.

What I would pursue, is to skip displacement if I can, but still have the same quality of results with bump, so I think I’m going to tweak that angle. I will leave this here and try to add some more settings a bit later :slight_smile:

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@Ds9geek Hey, if interested, I did some more :smiley: Updated the post above.

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