Water for Swimming pool and hot tubs

I have been building for a long time, but when I try to build a hot tub or swimming pool the water seems to disappear or just seen on the bottom. Can someone tell me the trick, I have looked around and no one elses seems to do that. HELPPPP

Is the water texture you are using an alpha? Are you using a flat prim or one to fill in the pool/water? Did you texture the whole prim with the texture or just one side? I am not expert here but it almost sounds like an alpha texture issue.

how about a 95% hollow cube rotated 90° x/y
see 2 faces from above and 1 face from inside to the top.

That sounds good, Ollj...but wouldn't it look funny when comparing adjacent sides? On one side, you're looking down thru the surface texture at the texture that's on the inside faces of the hollow cube. On the other side (the one with the hole in it) you are only looking down thru the surface texture at the wall of your pool.

How are you making the pool itself?

If you're trying to use an alpha texture for the rim of the pool, that will conflict with the alpha-textured water. This may cause the water in the pool to seem to disapear when viewed from certain angles. I recommend using actual prim shapes, textured only with non-alpha 24-bit textures, for the basin and atio surround of the pool itself.

The water plane is just that, a flat plane of one or more layers, textured to look like water from above, and made phantom, so people can "swim" in it. Since it is phantom, the water can't be linked to the pool itself.

Some swimming animation systems allow you to specify the height of the water surface, so you can "swim" anywhere below that height. Others use scripts in the water itself to control a swimming action.

If you get below the surface of that water plane, you won't see cloudy water effects. You'll just see a water plane above you, between you and the sky. There is no way to do volumetric water effects for an above-ground pool in SL. (Linden water, the "sea water" that in most sims fills the volume between zero and 20 meters, is a special case, and is at the same level from edge to edge in a sim.)

How do I know if it is an Alpha texture? It was one I found in my inventory. In fact I found all of them in my inventory. Can't remember where I got them. They were fine till I made the water transparent.

An alpha texture is one with transparent parts on the image. I am not sure if a normal texture set to transparent will aso show this bug ... probably!

Basically, if you have two textures with transparent bits, SL can't work out which should be in front of the other. The solution is to either change one of the textures for a non-alpha one, or place something in between the two surfaces with a solid texture on it.

Just to confuse matters further, there are a few textures around which, although they appear to be solid, non-alpha textures, have been uploaded with an alpha channel, and these will also show this bug.

Type Ctrl-Alt-T. Anything with an alpha channel will show up with a red highlight.

Some of the marble and stone textures in the Library were saved as 32-bit alpha textures, by mistake, and the Lindens have never corrected that. This is probably the source of your problem.

As Rolig Loon stated, turning on the "highlight transparent" option by typing Ctrl-Alt-T will highlight in red any textured survaces that have a 32-bit texture on them.

You can save the texture to your local hard drive and re-import it into SL as 24-bit TGA to fix that bad texture, so you can still use it, if this is indeed your problem.

I will try that, Thanks to all of you who answered.

Well that fixed it, but now I have another question. How do I save a texture to my hard drive so I can fix it. I have never messed with textures much, but guess I will have to in the furture...

click, open the texture from your inventory, go to edit and choose 'save as'.

I linked the water to my pool using the stiff flexi trick. It works great! Water still animates and it's phantom.

What's the "stiff flexi trick"???

http://www.mermaiddiaries.com/2007/07/day-286-creating-flexi-prims-tutorial.html

or

http://secondlife.wikia.com/index.php/Flexible

Pyrrha Magic

I fixed the texture, WHOO HOO, it worked. Thanks everyone for the info and help.