Gilles Tran wrote:
> 
> Real ocean waters can look very metallic under certain lighting conditions.
> Water is a weird material indeed, I can't help noticing how solid it looks
> every time I'm on a boat.

Well, actually i was more referring to smaller water surfaces like lakes
or puddles.  Anyway in nearly all situations the interaction of the light
with the water plays an important role.  In my experience the solid look
is limited to looking at the water at a fairly shallow angle against the
light (like a typical sunset image).

> Any water surface that it isn't 90% flat is hard in POV-Ray. Ripples are OK
> but otherwise, it's more an artistic impression of water than anything else.
> Every tried to make a gently rolling ocean water ? 

Have you seen:

http://www-public.tu-bs.de:8080/~y0013390/pov/water/water_inc.html

Of course as soon as the waves are strong enough to break it starts
looking artificial.  The major drawback is that it is a slow function,
therefore using it in an isosurface is quite a pain and a heightfield is
bad for a large water surface too of course.  A possible solution would be
creating a mesh with varying detail level.

> A good solution I've been using is the function-based height field, because
> one can use low-resolution versions during tests and tune it according to
> distance and it renders much faster that regular isosurfaces. 

But as soon as you have some steeper parts in the terrain you tend to get
quite serious problems with heightfields.  And increasing the resolution
then often makes in worse and not better.

Christoph

-- 
POV-Ray tutorials, IsoWood include,                 
TransSkin and more: http://www.tu-bs.de/~y0013390/  
Last updated 13 Aug. 2002 _____./\/^>_*_<^\/\.______

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