Making water

[Frits]

I tried to find this subject with search but all I got was "words in your search query were ignored because they are too common words". I wonder how to find something about 'water'.
Today I have tried to make some water with tranparency. I did not succeed, seen the lessons in Wiki, no luck.
I have a water-texture with an alpha channel, but what ever I set the slider on; no tranparency, knob UseAlpha does not seem to work for me.
Will somebody please explain how to do this?

Regards,
Frits

[andylegate]

Depends on what kind of water you are trying to make Frits.

Are you trying to just make a flat plane with a transparent texture that looks like water?

or

Are you trying to make water that ripples, and looks like reflective waves that move about?

If you are trying to make the last one, the here is the link to the tutorial for it:

Wavesets Tutorial

Note, that with Wavesets, you wouldn't give it a texture, as it basically is a distorted dynamic enviromental reflective map.

[Frits]

Thanks for your answer Andy, I try to make the first you mentioned. As a noob I think I have to begin simple and later on making the ripples.

Regards,
Frits

EDIT; This picture says it all:



How do I get rid of these artifacts?

[Jojon]

Have a look in the Buttons->Shading->"Links and Pipeline" panel for your material. There should be a numeric input box named "ZOffs:". You use the value here to decide the order in which overlapping transparent surfaces should be drawn; the closer to you they are, the higher the value. So you'll need to set the material for your ground mesh to e.g. "ZOffs: 0" and the water to "ZOffs: 1". This will ensure that the ground is drawn first and then the water suface is drawn on top.

To make the water transparent, just reduce its mixing ratio under the MapTo tab. With a single texture, you could use "Col 0.5", for a 50/50 mix. Take this opportunity to play around with other mixing modes - additive mixing in particular is very useful, as is multiply.

[Frits]

Thanks Jojon, I'll dive into this right away.

Regards,
Frits