What’s happening ladies and gentlemen, this is Minh from Architecture Inspirations. Today I’m going to show you how to create realistic pool water in Vray for Sketchup. Let’s get started. First you need to create a pool. Here I have modeled a very simple rectangular pool with some white tiles applied to it. Now I'm going create a surface for the pool water, then I’m going to group it. Also, I need to make sure that the front face is pointing upward. So I will need to reverse this face. Now we can apply a water material to this face. If you look in the Vray Material Library, in the Liquid category, you can see that there are some materials for water. However, it does not look very realistic. You can see that it’s way too dark and doesn’t look much like pool water. So let’s delete this, and create our own water material from scratch. First, I will create a Generic Material. Then I’m going to rename this as “Pool Water”. Let's start adjusting the material by changing the Diffuse color to Black. Then change the Reflection Color to White And scroll down to the Refraction, and change that color to White as well. We also need to change the IOR to 1.33, which is the Index of Refraction for water. I’m going to change the preview to Ground which is more appropriate for our water material. Next, let’s go down here and add a displacement map. For this, I’m going to use a Noise texture. You can test out the different settings here but I’m going to keep the settings as it is. As you can see, the noise map added some waves to our material. Now let’s apply the material to the pool surface and do a test render. That’s odd, it’s not showing the wavy texture at all. If we zoom in closer, we can see the wavy texture, but it’s too small. So we need to increase the size of the water material. But if you look at the Sketchup material editor then you can see that we cannot adjust the size. This is because there’s no texture map, if you increase the opacity, then you can see that it’s just black. So to fix this, I will go down to binding, and assign a texture for our material. In this case, I will use the texture helper option. Here you can’t really see the texture, but if we increase the opacity again, we can see that a texture helper map has been added to the material. Now we can finally increase the size of our material and render again. There we go, that looks pretty good! But as we know, pool water often has a blue color. So we can add a blue tint to the water by adding a Fog Color here. I'm going to assign a light blue color using the color picker. Or I can type in specific values here as well. Now let's test render it. This is a little too dark, so I'm going to reduce the fog multiplier to 0.002 I can also add a color for the Refraction as well. I’ll just copy this light blue color, and paste it here. Then I can adjust it to make it a little greener to create a more interesting look for the water This is starting to look really good, but if we take a look at reference photos of pool water, you can see that the water has these cool effects. This is called Caustic To create this, first we need to turn off Affect Shadows in the Refraction of our water material. If you don’t see this option, then click here to toggle between the basic and advanced options. Now let’s go to the Settings tab, expand the Global Illumination rollout and click here to open up the advanced settings. The caustics will only work when the interactive mode is off so we need to turn it off here. Now we can see the option for Photomapped Caustics. Turn that on, there are more settings here that you can use as well but I’m going to leave it as it is and do a test render. As you can see, the caustics effect is starting to show in our render now, but it looks really odd. To fix this, go to our Sun settings, and down to Options, Caustic Photons, we need to increase the Emit Radius. I will set it to 500. There we go, it’s starting to look better, but it still doesn’t look very good. Because if you remember, our sun light should shine all the way to this area, so this is not very accurate. This is because we are using Sun Light to light up our environment. Personally, I find using an HDRI works a lot better. So I will go on HDRIHaven.com and find an HDRI with sharp shadows. This one should work. I will leave the link in the description box below so you can download it and test it out for yourself. Now we can create a domelight, and load in the HDRI that we just downloaded. I will increase the intensity to 25 and turn on Use Transform so we can rotate the HDRI however we want. Make sure to turn off the Sunlight before we render. I will need to test the lighting first, so I’m going to hide the pool water surface, and do a test render. This is not bad, but I want more light and less shadows on the pool. So I can lock the camera using this button here, and zoom closer to the domelight, then rotate it until I like the lighting. That’s pretty good Now we can unhide the water surface. You can see that there’s no caustics. This is because the interactive render is on, so turn it off and render again Like before, there’s caustics, but it still doesn’t look right. So let’s go to our Domelight settings, down in the Caustic Photons section, I’m going to increase the Target Radius to 300. There we go, it’s getting better. I’m also going to change the Emit Distance to 400 And There it is, it finally looks good! One final thing that I can do is to increase the displacement of the water, this will make the caustics look sharper. But note that this will increase the height of the waves on the water as well And instead of using the Noise texture for the displacement map, you can also use a custom bitmap. Just google Water Caustics Texture, download it, and load it in the displacement slot. I’ll reduce the displacement amount to 1 to see how it looks. You can also copy and paste the texture in the binding to be able to see it in the Sketchup Viewport. When changing the displacement map, sometimes you may need to test it with different intensity to see what looks best. And that’s how you can create realistic pool water in Vray for Sketchup. Just apply this method to your scene like I did here in my latest model. If you want to get this model, it is available on my website, or you can sign up on my Patreon before the end of July to get it at a cheaper price. That’s all for today guys! Leave a like if you enjoyed the video. Comment below if you have any questions Stay inspired guys, and I will see you, next time 😉
