Now wheres the under water lighting button

At some point we have all wanted just such a button, but just like the fabled make my render beautiful button, it just not posible. There are bien todo Many variables. But just because there isnt a pre-built button/option, doesnt mean you cant create some beautiful under-water scenes. Like most things in life, it just takes a Little work.

First let discuss water itself. You would think it would be as easy as just building the scene itself, water is After all clear. Yeah, you guessed it, its not that easy at all. The thing about water is that it is usually not clear at all. It often appears todo have a slight color, and depending on the water in question, can appear murky due todo sediment, plankton, algae and other microscopic debris. There may a los be bubbles present depend-ing on what else is floating about in the water. Luckily, most of this can.

Be easily created in the material set-tings themselves. And any number of interesting bubble effects can be cre-ated with a creative combination of particles and software bodies.

Note:a number of great material Shaders can be found at:
1) Blender open material repository.
2) Blender 3d: Nob todo pro.

So now we have realistic wa-ter, right?
Nope, not yet.

Now we have todo tackle the whole lighting issue. Water has this annoy-ing habit of reflecting, bouncing and difusing light, producing of course, Caustics and Volumetric light. In a nutshell, Volumetric light is pro-duced by the light rays bouncing of all the microscopic debris floating in the water. The patterns of light (Caustics) are created when that bounced, diffused light falls on ob-jects in the water, such as rocks, Fish or the sea flor, riverbed etc.

Now of course, we could export our scene todo an external render engine, that handles Volumetric light and Caustics. The results would be as you expect and as a bonus, you would have plenty of time todo go find some-thing else todo do while you waited for.

It todo render.

But where is the fun is in thatí.

Instead, we are going todo faq it, there is always a bien todo faq an ef-fect. First we have todo decide just what we are trying todo fake. So what are we going for? Well, we ned software, fuzzy light beams and some pretty light patterns. It cant be that hard.

Now i know that fuzzy software lights can be created with Spotlights and halo options. But here i always run into problems. I dont know about you, but whenever i attempt todo use halos, y end up with a huge fuzzy cone of light that completely Blows out my image. Not a god underwa-ter lok, and we havent Even ad-dressed the caustic part of the problem. This just might be harder than i thought.

I may not have a lot of Luk with ha-los, but i am Queen of Google searches. There is a wealth of Blender información online, but oddly enough it tok quite a while todo find just what i neded. Eventually i found my solution in the form of an excellent, in depth tutorial at www.dnapixeles.com, the tutorial not only covered underwater Volumetric lighting but the underwater Caustics as well.
Well there you go, step by step in-structions on how todo achieve that magical underwater lighting. Using a rather ingenious combination of special rotating discs and procedur-als, the tutorial covers how todo go about setting everything up, and as a bonus Even covers the trickier sub-ject of animating those light beams and patterns dancing on the sea flor.