C4D Water help!

[michaelocallaghan]

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

[michaelocallaghan]

I testing with thin cylinders (for each stream from the shower) with displacement noise and a water shader. this might be a newbie question (im fairly new to C4D and Vray) how do I make an object not cast or receive shadows?

[Ernest Burden III]

(im fairly new to C4D and Vray) how do I make an object not cast or receive shadows?

 

The shower could be a series of splines for each water stream, and placing a small 3D 'drop' at each point. Particles can do a perfect job of it and it animates, though you can 'freeze' it for doing stills. But really you are over-thinking it. Unless you want a view from close to or even in the shower stream, just do the cylinder or a sweep and map a drop pattern on using alpha and a water material. Don't think of it as a bunch of trees, think of it as the forest.

 

To control shadow casting, use a Compositing Tag, either a C4D one or a vRay one if you are rendering with that. Select the object in the Object Manager, right-click and go to either Cinema tags of vray tags. In the tag there are checks for cast/receive shadows, as well as GI and other things.

[michaelocallaghan]

hey that's good. I think I do want to see it pretty up close though. dont know how it will be used in individual jobs (probably not too close) but my boss would like it to be good enough to stand up close up in case we ever wanna use it that way (god enough for any situation basically) how would you do the drops? I just mean in the references I'm looking at the water is mainly in fine streams rather than drops. I thought maybe at the end I would put some drops in here and there. right now I'm doing it straight from up to down with the idea of using a bend modifier at the end when I'm sitting the water onto the shower...

 

Ive got a Vray compositing tag but It still seams like its casting shadows (at least on itself). I think it looks a bit like Ice atm...

 

 

anyway cheers for replying! any further advice is welcome!

here's the ref I'm trying to match if it helps:

Edited May 28, 2013 by michaelocallaghan

[Ernest Burden III]

That doesn't look like it is shadowing, just refracting, which it should be.

[michaelocallaghan]

yeah... that makes sense, stupid of me.... still looks like Ice though, not sure what to do about that... maybe an opacity map to break it up a bit? just tossing Ideas around

[michaelocallaghan]

just to wrap this up. just had to find the sweet with the refraction values and the displacement values. (different depending on the scale of the water) also added a very small luminosity value which made the refractions less dark