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Effect of looking through water
I’m working on a short film about water and I’m interested in doing an effect of looking through water as if your looking at the bottom of a pool.
I believe that the Caustics effects achieves this?
Is this correct?
Does anyone know of any tutorials?
Thanks
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6 Replies
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Did you Google “after effects” + caustics + tutorial ? Or search the COW?
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There are several effects caused by looking through a body of water, but refraction and caustics are the primary things you would want to mimic. Refraction causes objects underwater to appear distorted, while caustics is more responsible for the focused highlights you see.
Jim Tierny wrote a thorough and very comprehensive tutorial on creating these effects, right here on the Cow:
Brendan Coots
Splitvision Digital
http://www.splitvisiondigital.com -
Indeed, but are we under the surface or above it? Refraction would not be seen if we were under the surface, since we’d be looking through one material (water) and not two (air/water). 🙂
Unless we’re wearing a diving mask …
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Indeed the Caustics effect (in conjunction with Wave World) will do it. But it will also render at a heart-stoppingly slow pace.
If you’re working on a “film,” that implies you might have shot some live action, and Aharon made a pretty sweet use of live action water footage as a displacement map in his third displacement map tutorial:
Having just recently spent about 10 hours working on a 5 sec. shot using the wave world / caustics combo, I highly recommend working at least a little of this displacement map technique into the mix — if only to make your project more doable…
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Heheh, I assumed we were above the water looking in…
Brendan Coots
Splitvision Digital
http://www.splitvisiondigital.com -
Looking from the surface to the bottom.
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