Poolside water test
Added 2018-09-20 06:45:29 +0000 UTCThis is a render test of the current refraction/reflection setup for the pool and lamps (which attempt to simulate an airy volume behind the glass lenses, since that's where the energized bulbs are located). The surface of the water is kinda invisible here since there's not much to reflect around the pool, but that should get fixed soon enough when the rest of the scene starts to come together.
Otherwise, I think (read: I'm hoping) everything else is fairly accurate here. Part of the reason why I haven't had much to post recently was because I was too busy fighting with the appearance of the pool looking totally wrong- almost like the water had no sustenance or "wetness" to it. I think the main problem was that I totally forgot to consider how interfaces work between different materials with different IORs- for example, ceramic tiles look totally different underwater than they do above water, since the IOR interface is totally different (underwater is 1.33 => 1.54, whereas above water is 1 => 1.54). This seems to completely negate the ability for a lot of glassy surfaces to reflect light underwater, which causes them to appear reasonably dull and diffuse lit instead.
Likewise, the randomized colors for the tiles have been pulled back a lot, since the previous setup was way too busy and I found it kept drawing your attention away from the character and into the pool instead (which was never the intention). Hopefully things will be a bit easier to look at going into the future, since the whole point of this project was to build a nice scene that serves to highlights the characters (and their enhanced curves) rather than detracting from them.
