Prim Water

I'm going to abuse the forum and mis-post my question here.

Who makes the really good prim water? I specifically want mild running water and small and NICE falling water. I would also like to make a natural prim "pool" with very mild swirling.

Thanks!

There was some discussion of prim water here:

/327/35/289270/1.html

There are two ways to make falling water. With a moving texture on a prim, or with particles.

The moving texture is easiest (for me anyway), but it has a drawback...if you make it and the water it falls into transparent or partly so, you get alpha channel glitches.

The basic particle script (Outy Banjo's?) that's all over the place can be tweaked to produce nice falling water, but you must also have a good water drop texture to use with the particles.

I like Shep's water textures for pools. For the indoor waterfall I built in my castle I tweaked the texture animation myself. It's really easy to do, just a single call in LSL. Just build a couple long prim "sheets" and texture them with some good looking water texture, then add a script to animate it. Personally, I think it looks more convincing than using particles, just as long as you are cognizant of other alpha textures in the area.

What pleases my eye for prim water is to make all but the top surface of the prim an invisible texture, use a slow texture rotation speed and layer two or three sheets with varying transparencies, slight angular offsets and slight texture speed differences. This results in a quite pleasing rippling effect rather than the 'marching texture' result of a single layer. Not forgetting to back the whole thing with a suitable static texture.

For particle effects I go to Basic Elements No affiliation other than a satisfied customer.

This U-Tube video gives a good idea of quality: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JCgKhYAeHr4

Rime

Yes, this is what I do and it looks less artificial and more esthetically pleasing, too.

Another tip: try some yellow tones for tints (using slightly different ones in each layer), instead of flat blues. The blues are okay in a swimming pool but look very false in a pond or stream context.

Nice. I love the demo vidios have to check them out.

I've never seen good prim water. It always looks a little too fake to me.

An example of prim water using the technique I mentioned earlier.



Water is two layers of water texture with an underlying seabed texture. All textures from the default library.

Standard viewer. Shadows are prim shadows.

Rime

That really is gorgeous.

We have to hope that eventually this will become the standard, replacing those many chunks of bright blue Ripple Layer 1 that sit around SL as 'ponds'.

Thank you all for the hints and tips. Especially to Rime - I'll give that a try!

I was quite pleased with the result myself and glad to hear others like it.

I had a freebie up on X-Street but after the latest stunt by LL I pulled all my products off and won't be back there.

The freebie is now available from a vendor in my gallery in Zugspitze

If anyone would like the freebie vendor please drop me an IM in world.

Yes, it does use the ubiquitous 'Ripple Layer 1' but a bit of transparency and the layer effect transform it somewhat

Cheers
Rime

Edit to add: Forgot to add full bright to the base texture which makes the colors pop a bit and even look pretty neat at night for shallow water. Might not be so hot to have a dayglo pond though.

bleh now i wish i would have taken pictures of the water flowing in my ice cave..
Aaaany ways hehehe
if you add a layer or two of either the cloud or mist textures from the default textures they give you in your library and toy with the sizes and play with the colors you can add a nice misty glow to your stream as well..
or you could toy with a texture that will run both edges of your stream or rotate the edges of a pond..it gives a nice feel to the edges if you have the script set as slow as you can get it..


This is just an example i threw together..i took a misty brush at about 500 and ran the brush just outside my image size to try to get as much mist as i could.
now in my creek i would spread this texture out as wide as i could trying to keep the water as misty on the edges as possible ..then set your script to run down the stream and it will give it this neat glow..the more inconsistent the mist the more glowing alive feel it will show..the white will also be transparent so ignore that on here..
if it were a pond i would try to match up the edges of the pond doing the same thing with the texture rotating around the ponds edges the best i could..
This image is not the best example of a mist..it took about two seconds to make..and being on a white background isn't helping much..


if you are setting this close to actual sim water i have some really neat things you can do with prims and sim water that will show some nice depth..you can really get creative if sim water is used =)

Update: After the 'November Surprise' I pulled all my stuff off X-Street.

The freebie water example was getting a lot of interest so it is now available in world from a vendor at my gallery in Zugspitze. Still free, just left click and pay L$0



The vendor delivers the original 8m x 8m freebie plus pre-linked 8m x 16m and 16m x 16m versions.

The vendor also delivers a copy of itself should you wish to make it available elsewhere.

Cheers
Rime

Rime, I got a copy of your water example on XStreet several weeks ago (or maybe longer; it's been a rough 4 weeks...) and it looks great. Thanks for making it available.

On my land, I've had good luck making a pond from a single cylinder prim with a slow texture movement and the free water texture from Higbee Protagonist's Parks and Recreation starter pack*. (Not sure of the exact name.) I could probably get even better results layering and tinting, but I haven't tinkered with it much.

* Ironically, another freebie acquired from XStreet that will probably vanish from there in the wake of the changes LL is making...

Thank you Rime. I hadn't grabbed it yet, as I haven't reached the point of adding water. Glad to know it's to be found in-world when I get to it.

Ante Flax (or was it Flan?) had some nice waterfalls. They are not too solid.