Charles Postiaux shows how to build realistic water in Blender using only procedural textures, no fluid simulation. He uses a Principled BSDF shader with Musgrave or Noise textures for the bump map, adjusts metallic and transmission settings, and lights the scene with 20 W lights above and below to make the water visible in Cycles.
How to make a cool water texture in Blender. Super easy, and you don't even need actually to have the water simulation. It's just all procedural texturing. So you can see here, it's really cool. The quality is pretty insane. It looks so realistic. And so you can see here, I have a Principled BSDF, 0.2 metallic, 0.5 specular, transmission 1. I've tried to add a little of base color, just a little bit of blue. Then I have a bump which connects to the normals. Strength, I tried 0.2, but you can change it, it depends on what you want. Here it's a swimming pool, so that's why. But yeah, you can switch between noise texture and Musgrave. It depends also on what you want. I feel like noise would be better on a bigger ocean. Maybe like on— oh, I mean bigger ocean, sure. On an ocean, I think Musgrave is a little bit more— I feel like has a little bit more depth to it, you know, volume. So yeah, here I messed it up, but you can change it. You can change this multi-fractal into different things. You can see here my details. Make sure to have the node Wrangler, I think it's called. So you can check in your preferences and in your add-ons, and then you just select Musgrave Texture and Ctrl+T. Yeah, you need to have the object from texture coordinate, you need to link it to the vector on the mapping so that everything we do here, the procedural texturing, works. And so once you have that, you're basically done with the whole water texture. Something else I've noticed with this is that if you do not have light underneath the water, then you're not going to really see very well textures down it. So for a swimming pool, for example, after, you know, it depends on the water you want to use and the style you want to go with, but for me at least, I wanted to have the swimming pool to be seen, and so I had to have some lighting. So as you can see, I have the lighting underneath the swimming pool. It's not very bright, it's only 20 watt of power on every side of it. And I also have one light above it. So above the water, I have an area light. And so yeah, I have just 20 watts everywhere above it and under it so that you can see very well the texture of the water and also underneath the water so that it makes— it gives this impression that the water is actually— you can, you can actually see through it. But I think with Cycles, it just looks perfect. This is not my work. This has been made by another artist who's called Alexis Christodoulou. I hope you liked this tutorial. I hope it wasn't too long, and I see you for the next one.
Bye!
