How to Achieve Wet Body/Wetness on a non-Human Figure?

DrowElfMorwen

It seems my techniques for attempting this on Iray do not work nearly as nicely on, say, an orca as they do on Genesis...

I have previously followed this tutorial, but trying to apply it to my orca, not a human: http://thinkdrawart.com/how-to-get-wet-skin-in-iray

It did not turn out well. The water droplets (on a geoshell) did not reflect the light as I was hoping they would, and the whale's skin is still too smooth underneath.

http://sta.sh/01b8sukl9k1n

The 70 x 70 tiled effect isn't too bad I guess... but it's still not the level of realism it needs to be. And the water really needs to reflect more light. I put the basic Iray water shader on this geoshell.

My aim is to get something like this.... the broken up sunlight on this orca's skin: http://cdn.pcwallart.com/images/orca-jumping-wallpaper-3.jpg

Any suggestions?

ArtisanS

Water is a bit illusive in iRay and the basis iRay water shader comes in three brands......for solid water.....in that case it's sort of using a volumetric effect....which does not stand a bleeding chance when you compare it to other renderers that do true volumetrics (like Cycles for instance). The seconds uses some kind of prism effect and the third one is for thin film water. Now I have no idea what you were using on the little whale/big dolphin.

What you see on the whale (photo or rendering I cannot say for sure) but the light enters the water on the back of the whale.....then gets reflected on the black skin of the whale......and then dispersed by the water again...that creates the broken up effect of the water. Now that means the skin must reflect the light (where the water form a layer repelled  by the skin, greass for instance, I know no orca's personally but I think they have some greass on their skin.

So I would create a reflectivity map where the water is.......then use the geoshell to disperse the water accordingly....and a bumpmap to distrubute the ripples and droplets in the water. But you will have to experiment around a lot to create what you want.....

Greets

Oso3D

Volumetrics depend on whether the item is treated as a thin shell or a solid mass. Thin shells act like soap bubbles or blown glass. An object defined with only one open side or with holes in the mesh (like opacity) can only function as a shell. So, geo shell drops have the problem that they usually use opacity maps, so must act like thin shells, so don't react quite like realistic water. You could make a geoshell with displaced bumps, make it solid water, then have much of it clipping under the surface, but then you run into the limitations of Iray displacement and can get ugly edges.