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For the past couple days I've been racking my head trying to create this complex acrylic material that resembles a piece of furniture i have. Basically its a pieces of thick refractive acrylic joined together its has a very nice glassy look to it, also, the back side of the vertical piece has a red colored less transparent strip of of acrylic instead of the clear. This lets the red color project and bounce around the whole piece from different angles, its a very cool effect. So i was able to get the bounce to work correctly but then i realized that the material i created wasn't behaving exactly like my sample. When i look at the sample i can see through the acrylic and see edges on the other side, it makes the depth and thickness and geometry of the object obvious even though its warped where faces overlap.Bellow I've attached a photo of the sample showing the location of the red strip outlined in green, and the effect im trying to achieve outlined in orange. My material isn't doing that and it looks frail and thin like brittle pieces of glass stuck together. I tried to sue a small outer shell modifier as a cheat to make get the effect i was looking for and it kind of worked but then i lost the red color bouncing around the objects. I could really use some help with this if anyone has mastered these kind of complex materials, I've always had trouble getting water to look realistic no matter how mater tutorials i watch its probably the same reason this is giving me trouble. I'm using Max2016 and vray 3.30.05 and my materials settings are posted below, thanks in advance for all of your help!!

Hi, a little stuck here. I'm working to visualize a seastead concept which involves floating architectural "bowls" within the ocean. Some of these have lower levels of water within them. I want the ocean to be volumetric if possible, since the viewer will be able to see through the walls of some of the bowls into it. (Note that the bowls are not completely rounded as showed below, so remodeling everything is NOT desirable.) I thought this would be easy. Simply model the bowls with some thickness to them, then boolean subtract the bowls from a giant "ocean box", then delete the inside-of-bowl water part.... well, not working out as planned. Using regular "boolean subtract" sort of works for the first shape, but as soon as I try to subtract other shapes from THAT one, the geometry goes haywire, and instead of getting bowl-shaped indentations, I get no indentation at all. Proboolean is even worse. I simply get a dialog box error saying "invalid boolean" when I try to pick Operand B. I keep hearing that booleans are bad, that they're sloppy, nobody should use them, etc... but what are my alternatives in this situation? Should I invest time into learning fluids in Max? Because this is a still water scene AND not an animation, I'd assumed it would be unnecessary. How else would I go about "filling in the cracks" between structures? Thanks.

Hey folks, I am trying to recreate a scene similar to THIS. I want to get the look of light shinning through in multiple area like that image. My scene has vrayenvironmentalfog and water setup. I tried using a vray light with a b/w image but it doesn't look anything like that. Is this the right path and how would you attempt at animate something like this? Appreciate any help.

Hey guys. I'm a full time artist at a 3d Vis studio and were trying to work out a good efficient way to do water coming out of a shower. it doesn't need to move or animate at all (the simpler the better so we can re-use it ect) so its just for static shots in bathroom scenes ect just to add an extra touch of realism. I could just model the streams and make a water shader; but I wanted to see what sort of ideas people here might come up with to maybe generate it faster. Cheers

if i use a normal plane and add a water material to it , the water looks nice and blue and crisp looking... if i modify the plane to have noise to make it look like its wavey the rendered pool water looks almost black?..happens always. Any ideas how to fix this? - using Vray and 3ds max. also for some weird reason i keep getting black all the time ...thanks for ur reply. and material used for this water....the second image is of the bump used. Sorry to be a pain guys, but I'd like to be able to produce something similar to this? http://newsletters.chaosgroup.com/nl_files/newsletter_images/newsletters_archive/04_1_11/Pool-and-Caustics580.jpg

I'm looking for comments and suggestions on this rendering. Its one of my first. Ignore the foreground material, I haven't modeled anything there yet. I'm also going the adjust the depth of field, so if it seems blury ignore that too. One thing I'm strugging with is how to handle the fountain. It is intended to be a block of granite with a sheet of water flowing across it. The water is collected into a grate at the bottom of the block. Right now the grate is just a plane with an image on it. The intersection of the block and the grate doesn't work. Any suggestions on how to simulate water splashing onto the grate? The block also seems to disapear into the grass. I've also burn't the edges of the brown pavers in photoshop to try and add some depth at the curb and wall. Is there an easy way to get the material do this automatically in the max material? It is a standard autodesk material. Please point out any other obvious newbie mistakes. Thanks, Dave

Hi all, I've posted a quick tutorial on Realflow here www.jamesshaw.co.nz/blog/?p=1083 if anyone needs a quick way of creating waterfalls and/ or fountains. It's pretty basic, but should give you enough scope to have basic control over how the water shapes and importing/ exporting from 3DSMax. Enjoy!

Hi All, For those wondering where I've been in the last past years... http://in2thewildblog.wordpress.com/ rgds, nisus

Studio/Institution: GWJ Architecture Genre: Residential Exterior Software: Cinema 4D Website: http://www.gwj.ch Description: Hello everyone! This is my first Post. It was for a competition. The goal was to create a hotel with a wellness-area, close to a lake. The time was very short, so the details of the building remindet quite low. It was more about giving an idea than create an image of the final building. We won the Competiotion actually, so the work on this will continue.... greets Yama

Hi, I'm working on a school assignment where i have to make and animate a 3D logo. So what I have here is a modeled macbook with like 60+ buttons and ports made according to its original design, as well the screen with a fake image. Everything here I did I used architectural and arch mental ray as textures. The 2 laptop panels (upper and lower) are IK'ed with bones, it's made so it's easy to stimulate realistic joint effects. Every single object is linked in some way. as well i have a reactor water object made linked to a plane so what I wanna ask is, how can i join all the laptop objects into one so that I can assign them a mass and not fall apart when dropped (the thing won't even allow me to create a rigid body, it says error..Help)? thanks reference image follows

I just spent the whole week learning reactor and Glue3D to simulate water movement when the client requires caustics instead of fluid water ripples. Ive never really touched caustics in vray so im a little stumped. I can create caustics (after going through this site and the attached tuts) but im still wondering how to create a pool with caustics. My Scene: A logo is at the bottom of the pool while the caustics and water movement distort the logo. The camera is top down looking into the pool and at the logo. Methods - Ive gone here (http://www.dualheights.se/caustics/) and generated caustics but im not sure how to implement the .ifl sequence. - Another thing Ive tried is animating water, but unfortunately i don't get the crisp caustics im after. Thanks in advance to anyone who can point me in the right direction. EDIT: im looking for something like this: http://img409.imageshack.us/img409/9265/causticdb3.jpg