Lake Underwater???

Hi All .. me again ...

A futher question in my series of stumbling blocks learning to terraform and creat rivers, waterfalls, and now .. Lakes.

Again have followed all the advice I could find here on the forums for creating a lake and so far so good, at least from out of the water. If I go into the water and go to a section of the lake where I am underwater ... boom! The prim disappears and it looks as if I'm standing on the ground with a layer of water (the top layer) above my head. Now I understand that this is what happens when you go inside a phantom prim .. but was wondering if there was anyway to deal with this so that at least it appears something like when I am under water in Linden water.

There is a way to fake it, but be warned, it will interfere with camera controls, and it can be a bit of a lag monster. Put a criss-crossing grid of of translucent black or dark blue walls under the water surface. That way, when you're standing there, you end up looking through them. Objects that are further away will have more walls in front of them from your point of view, so they'll look more darkened. Closer objects will have less in the way, so they'll look more normal.

It's far from an ideal solution, but it's really the only way to fake volumetrics in SL.

If it were me, I wouldn't bother.

As Chosen said, there's no way to properly fake that haze that should occur under water. Lots of shaded vertical planes that extend down from the water's surface can sort of work, but you'll see it from the surface, and it generally looks bad. I suppose particle generation could create a haze, but that would also be very laggy, and most likely would be sen above the surface.

So in general, lakes and rivers that are above the Lindn water plane are only really effective for surface use.

It's on the roadmap at LL to make a prim trpe or prim surface effect that matches Linden Water, so lakes can at least on the surface have the same visual appearance as Linden Water. Maybe those special prims would also replicate the volumetric effects of being below the Linden water plane? We can only wait and see.