Luxury Pool House...Brown Water. How To Get Blue Water?

vijayasimhabr

I have this product that I bought a few months ago.

https://www.daz3d.com/luxury-pool-house-and-garden

Now, finally getting around to playing around with it. It's real nice, until, I decided to take a upside down photo.

 

The water is....brown.

1. How do I make it, blue, like a real pool?
2. Also, how would I make it transaprent, like real water?

Thank you.

Paintbox

The blue of blue water is mostly a reflection of the sky above. This is actually a great exercise for any artist : go outside and check how water colour comes to be, especially close to you and further as the refraction changes.

So the most likely culprit might be is that you need a nice HDRI blue sky to reflect on the water. Maybe the in built sun-sky can do it to, not quite sure.

There are also a few water shaders that come with Iray in the shader folder you could play with it, if the above fails.

vwrangler

Luxury Pool House uses a custom Iray shader for the water, so you shouldn't need to touch that.

It also uses a trick with HDR that doesn't always work as planned -- if you set HDR to dome-and-scene without putting an HDR image in place, it give you sort of sun/sky-colored light. However, in this case, from several angles, what happens is that the gray concrete underneath combines with the sort of yellow tone of the light to produce brown. If you do as Paintbox suggests and put a blue-sky HDR into the scene, you should be fine.

Also, note that what you've shown here seems to be a capture of the workspace, rather than an actual render -- the grid won't show in a render, but does in the workspace. A custom water shader, like this one, will rarely appear in the workspace the way it should do with an actual render.

vijayasimhabr

Paintbox said:

The blue of blue water is mostly a reflection of the sky above. This is actually a great exercise for any artist : go outside and check how water colour comes to be, especially close to you and further as the refraction changes.

So the most likely culprit might be is that you need a nice HDRI blue sky to reflect on the water. Maybe the in built sun-sky can do it to, not quite sure.

There are also a few water shaders that come with Iray in the shader folder you could play with it, if the above fails.

 

I will give this a go. I realized that I could put something blue above the water (and just behind the camera when looking down) and get the blue results.

But, I will also give a HDRI option a try. Yes, thank you.

I remember some water Iray Shaders in my library. I did try some IRay shaders and turned the water into a flat floor of texture, but it did not occur to me that I could simply use a water shader.

vijayasimhabr

vwrangler said:

Luxury Pool House uses a custom Iray shader for the water, so you shouldn't need to touch that.

It also uses a trick with HDR that doesn't always work as planned -- if you set HDR to dome-and-scene without putting an HDR image in place, it give you sort of sun/sky-colored light. However, in this case, from several angles, what happens is that the gray concrete underneath combines with the sort of yellow tone of the light to produce brown. If you do as Paintbox suggests and put a blue-sky HDR into the scene, you should be fine.

Also, note that what you've shown here seems to be a capture of the workspace, rather than an actual render -- the grid won't show in a render, but does in the workspace. A custom water shader, like this one, will rarely appear in the workspace the way it should do with an actual render.

I have done a few final renders, and yes, brown is dominant unles there are other reflections. And the screenshot is from Iray preview. Note : you can see a tree being reflected on the bottom right.

But, you are right. The water in this product is different. I will consider the HDRI route. Or just put that blue wall (or anything that is big and blue) to get the reflection I want. The reflections work beautifully, so, there is always that option to get blue.

As always, thank you for the suggestions.