Topic awaiting preservation: Water Glare Test (about 100k)

Alright, a friend of mine was asking how to make a glare effect. Without using multiple lights or a texture map (so that the glare only shows from some angles, but from others, theres no ultra bright spots.)

I came up with this using HDRI lighting, and a combination of material reflectivity, and "flat mirror" reflection.

Pros:
- 0 lights used in the scene (except one omni turned off to disable the natural lights).
- No textures for the water
- Water and glare are completely animatable

Cons:
- Long render times (10-15 minutes per frame+)

Here's the image of the water:



Comments?

I've been looking at this for way to long, so I need some peoples input to figure out whats missing/needs to be fixed.

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http://uploader.axsstudios.com/images/riverfull2.jpg

Heres one from a lower angle so you can see that the white spots are only visible from the top.

looks nice, but i think the sharpness/blurryness of the water doesnt fit to the land.

also the "corner" between land and water is too exact. its like the water is perfectly flat plane which it isnt cause of the reflection you see.

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as in no lights I think InI...

now...onto the scene...

That water, it seems to blur the scene it's reflecting an awful lot. Water reflections reflect the scne very sharply, they just break it up due their uneven surface.

other than that, nothing else that I can say that hasn't already been said.

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Yeah, there's probably a diffuse map, or the textures are just set up to *look* like they're lit.

I don't entirely understand how you got the effect, and while it looks cool, it seems unnatural that the reflections in the water would be *quite* that blurred. If they are, then I'd think the blurredness of the light would appear somewhat over the ground (instead of having the little circles of white get cut off by the land).

I obviously didn't specify clear enough. The scene doesn't use light, just global illumination (HDRI lightning). I don't mean nothing is generating light, just that there are no lights shining directally on the water to create the light spots. Its like real life, the light is from the sun, and bounces off all the objects, creating indirect illumination.

Its supposed to be in a forest (I know theres no trees in the side view, but there could be, and there is shadows for them) so not to much of the sky would be scene reflected and where the light does get through, it causes the glare. But the reflections do seem to blurry, and I'll try to figure out a way to make the light spots of the water also cast light on the land around it.

The poster has demanded we remove all his contributions, less he takes legal action.
We have done so.
Now Tyberius Prime expects him to start complaining that we removed his 'free speech' since this message will replace all of his posts, past and future.
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Based on the scale of the shadows, the stream looks to be no more than a foot across at the narrow point. Given that, most of the problems are with scaling:

The ground under water is blurry and dark. Shallow water shouldn't blur the ground, and it shouldn't absorb much light. You'd only see that kind of darkness with very deep water (if the stream is 1 foot across and 10 feet deep, the darkness would be appropriate, but the stream would be very weird).

Both the underwater blurring and the underwater light dropoff wouldn't be out of line if this were a very large river seen from a very great hight. It's just scaling issues.

The highlights are, as others have said, very blurry. Highlights are normally very sharp when looking at water from close range. The blur level in this image would be more appropriate to, say, moonlight reflecting off the surface of a lake. Again, if this were a large river seen from a great height, the blurring wouldn't be so bad. Even then it would need to be toned down some.

The water is too turbulant for the scale. Small streams should have slight ripples. If the water is moving very fast you would get 'folds' as the water flows around corners. The high degree of agitation here looks like someone is violently shaking the ground.

The cuastic on the far shore, toward the top of the image, looks too intense to me. It looks like the kind of caustic you'd get from a very bright sunlit day, but the image doesn't seem that bright.

It does definitely look like water; it just needs the settings tweaked to bring it into scale

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