Make Realistic Water in Blender! (Fast n' Easy)

okay so this is kind of something that I probably should have done a long time ago but I want to talk about how to make a nice looking water Shader so uh what we've got here is a uh Shader setup that looks like this and I'm gonna show basically what all these things do and how we're going to reach this point so uh first thing I'm gonna do is I'm gonna make a new plane I'm going to move it up so it's kind of in the middle here and I'm just going to make it nice and big so it covers uh the area of the scene I'm going to create a new material and I'm going to just start by getting rid of this principle Shader and I am going to add in a glossy Shader I'm going to plug this in here and make this with very little roughness so it's very reflective and um in a pinch you can basically make water like this like if you just need something to reflect and be like okay this is kind of a watery surface but let's get in and actually you know make this have some depth and refraction and some texture so let's start with the texture um I'm going to just add in a Musgrave texture I'm going to plug this into the displacement and I'm going to make the scale just a bit bigger like this and going to Ctrl shift click on this so I can see it in the viewport or as the surface and um this might be a node Wrangler enabled tool so if you don't have that enabled go to the preferences and turn that on okay so um we can see what the scale is doing here I want to add a bit more detail and add let's see a little less Dimension so it's a little bit more wavy like this I think that looks good um I'm going to add in a mix RGB and plug this into that so now it looks like this and I'm going to add in a noise texture I'm going to put that into here with a factor I'm going to select this so we can see what it's looking like and it's looking like this I'm going to bring the scale up a bit and um keep it kind of a mid roughness and keep the detail pretty similar right now anyways so if I select this you can see this is what it's looking like I kind of want there to be patches of both so I'm gonna duplicate this Musgrave I'm going to add in a um transparent texture here and I'm going to put these through a mix Shader so now you can see uh we've got we've got some depth to this because we can actually see through it and that looks okay on its own I want to change this so might make it a nice pleasant greenish for now like that's starting to look it's starting to look pretty cool actually um and you can change how much of each we see probably don't want too much of the glossy just enough so we get some reflection on here but I want to be able to see through because I want to make this look nice so um yeah I'm starting to be happy with where this is going but um it's still missing some stuff like the refraction so actually what I'm going to do is I'm going to disconnect this transparent and just move this over here I'm going to duplicate this mix and put it here and put the transparent in over here so I can control this on its own and I'm going to add in a refraction node here and let's see I'll put this on the top the bottom and what does their faction node do well basically it refracts so as you can see it's making everything uh that's beneath this material here look very flat and washed out even though there is depth to it and we kind of want that because the water is going to distort what's underneath it um but also it doesn't have a lot of reflection on it and it's a little too much I feel like and it's kind of when you look at it it's a little bit like oh what is wrong with that material so that's why I want to mix it through with the glossy so we get a bit of Best of Both Worlds um I want this to be a bit more heavy on the refraction side of things like this so we still get some of that gloss let's put it maybe here and some of that reflectivity but also it's got the refraction underneath as well um while we're at it I want to make this uh roughness on here a bit more interesting so I'm going to plug the color from this mix into the roughness to give it kind of some areas that are a lot less rough in areas that are more rough I'm going to add in a color ramp here to control this and remember black areas are going to have zero roughness white areas are going to have total roughness and we don't want anything to be completely rough so I want to make this be at best gray and we're going to change this from linear to ease so it's just a bit more of a gradual slope so now you can see it's a lot more of a subtle difference than before when it was just very in your face so now it's looking like this with both of these and like this with all of them um see I think we're going to want to ease off a little bit on that transparent I don't want it to be quite so see-through I want it to be a little bit more like this and that's looking pretty good except I'm gonna walk back on what I said earlier I think this here is getting a little distracting I'm just going to delete that out and I think that looks much better there's less extreme highlights coming on and um yeah this is how I arrived at my result it's very quick to throw together it looks pretty good um and if you want to move these and have them move around you can change the noise from 3D to 40 and you have this um I'm just going to select this so you can see what I'm doing you have this uh here which basically moves this around without changing the scale so if you control T to bring up this mapping and texture coordinate nodes you can move this around and uh keyframe that in to get some movement it's a very good way to get like a quick little animation going I believe you can do the same for here too yeah with the Musgrave so um if you were to plug these in and just say uh we'll move them on the max sure I'm gonna do hover over this press I to insert a keyframe I'm going to go to the layout I'm going to move a bit further down the timeline here I'm going to move the Z I'm going to do 0.2 works I'm going to press I again and I'm going to select both these shift e linear extrapolation linear extrapolation so now if I press play it's just constantly going to move now it's going a little fast so we can just take this keyframe and drag it forward so it should be a bit more of a subtle difference now um I'm going to put it to viewport shading so that it will actually be a little bit more obvious what is going on here because Cycles is great but it's not going to be able to update fast enough to watch this so now you can see we've got some subtle nice movement going on here and you can imagine it looks very nice when you rendered in cycles and that is how I would make some nice looking water shaders

Channel: Rendered in Blender

Views: 14,972

Keywords: 3.3, blender, glossy, material, ocean, refraction, shader, simulation, texture, transparent, water

Id: ke-MgwUxLjI

Length: 8min 23sec (503 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 21 2023