underwater appearance

Not really sure if this is a question for building, texturing or scripting but since I only want to post it once here it goes.

I’ve made a large mountain lake (elevation above sea level) using 1 large prim and have found textures and scripts that give me a nice surface appearance. The problem is that when I go below the surface it just looks like an open area without the cloudy underwater look.

Is there something I can do in the way of texturing, scripts or particle effects to give my lake a more natural underwater look? Any advice or points in the right direction are much appreciated.

That won't involve a few hundred prims, not really. I use sets of prims, set to default texture, black in colour with about an 80% transparency. Many layers, the progression of the transparencies will give the effect of graduated darkness. i would avoid using an actual texture, you will get a tonne of flickering. But a few hundred scattered in a concave pattern will appropriate darkness.

There was talk of adding a default shaded water prim in the library, oh maybe a year or so ago. When they changed the water engine. I assume that has been long forgotten.

Oh yeah, set them to phantom, obviously.

You can't really replicate the cloudy water effect under a prim lake. SL does not support volumetric effects like that.

As the previous poster indicated, you can add a bunch of phantom semi-transparent prims, but in my experience, the effect is marginal, and makes it hell to navigate a camera in that mess. And from above you'll see all sorts of alpha sort glitches.

Any particle effects to make cloudy water would need to stop sharply at the water's surface, and I don't have a clue how that could be scripted. I don't think it can. It would also create a fair amount of lag.

Thanks for the responses and advice. I added a set up honeycombed cylinders that have some texture motion below the surface. It’s not all that great but still gets rid of the “wide open” look.

Give us sURL... I'd like to see the result.

I didn’t like the looks of it so scraped project.