Newbie's Guide to Water ??

Hello!

I have been working on a fountain that I want to build for myself... the only problem is, I don't really know how to go about making the water. I've done a few searches for tips on creating water in Second LIfe and I've not found anything very helpful yet.

Would any of you have a link to an article/tutorial/tip for beginning builders and "building" water.

Any help is greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

Hi Runeswan!
It really depends on what you want to do with the water. If your fountain is just for show you get a good looking water texture, make your prim and then put a texture rotation script in it and BAM its flowing like a fountain. I have done this in some fountains I have built and it looks really good. If you need the script its widely available in world (for free) or you can send me an im and I'll drop it on you. Good luck!!

And if you want to make it so it's more of a liquid than a solid, edit the prim that the water will be. then, check the box "Phantom" under the "Object" tab.

~Sean

There seem to be several scripts floating around in-world for water. I've seen "Smooth" , "Flow", "Goo", possibly others. Can anyone explain simply what these do?

Just put the texture on a prim and try out the scripts one at a time. Make the surface larger (resize the prim) and you will see the effects better.

Look in your inventory's Library section, and there are textures and scripts for doing water there. AnimSmooth is the main one for a flowing water effect. It takes a texture that is already applied to a water prim and slowly slides it across each face of the prim it is in.

It helps when doing cascades of water to texture only the front and back of your water prims. Use a 100% alpha texture on the edges. Otherwise you get very visible seams at the prim edges, and some water anilation scripts can produce strange edge effects.

Water for a fountain can also be done with particle effects scripts, rather than prims.

Basically what you want to do in short is buying a water texture and a texture rotation script.
Put the script in the water object and the texture should move, edit the script to swap the movement around.

Why buy when you can do it for free if you follow Ceera's advice?

Can anyone discuss prim shapes for water objects? I mean, a box or a flat cylinder's pretty obvious for a pool or basin...but what about waterfalls? What makes that "candy cane" shape as the water flows over the edge and then down? What do you do about the splash at the bottom?

Hollow a Torus out and use the advanced cut to trim away what you don't need. That's one way to get a good fountain effect. Taking this further you can have the water running out of a channel contract slightly (see second link below) by using a torus, cut and advance cut then squashed to suit.

For splashes at the bottom you might want to look into a custom particle effect to make a ring of particles around the interface between your torus and the standing water. There is a particle effect in the folder Ceera mentioned above which you could use as your starting point if you'd like to give it a go yourself.

For an example of a particle-only fountain see http://www.slexchange.com/modules.php?name=Marketplace&file=item&ItemID=203275
For an example of a prim fountain see
http://www.slexchange.com/modules.php?name=Marketplace&file=item&ItemID=10262

Cut and hollowed toruses work well here. You can profile cut to remove part of the donut, and cut the prim itself to remove more, then hollow it to get what looks like the outer 1/3 of the surface of a 1/4 donut. Cut and hollowed culinders also work well, especially when making a cascade of water that is spilling off a flat lip or rim on a fountain.

You can also take a cylinder and make it flexible and allow it to hang down to the catch basin. Experiment with drag/wind/gravity - you can actually make the water react to the environment like real water does.