For the lotus pools, I had zero idea how to go about actually approaching the rendering and creation of water, that is, until I came across the most wonderful tutorial on exactly that below.
Whilst I’m not going for a swimming pool look, it was a very helpful tutorial for the basics of modelling and rendering water in VRay. The rendering settings it provides for caustics I followed pretty much to the letter. Here are a few shots of the water model I created for the pool, with some captioned commentary:
Due to the non-primitive shape, I couldn’t just add divisions with a slider like in the tutorial – I had to add them in other ways. My somewhat cumbersome workaround involved using just a flat plain with a turbosmooth applied, THEN applying a Shell modifier to add thickness, then the Noise modifier to add the ripples.
The Turbosmoothed water, minus ripples. The order of the modifier stack was important – if I’d put the smooth after the shell it would smooth the edges in too – I wanted a nice vertical profile so I could intersect the resulting form with the pool walls without the possibility of any of it bulging outward of the walls.
The ripples added through the Noise modifier. Lovely, simple method.
My main reference for the water, an actual lotus pool at the ArtScience Museum in Singapore. (http://www.arcspace.com/CropUp/-/media/524761/ArtScience-Museum-lily-pond-2.jpg)
Some clear similarities to the pool I was going for, even in form, which was unexpected considering I merely stumbled across it when looking at water lotus images. (https://lightslant.files.wordpress.com/2013/09/dpp_0489.jpg)
Sadly, I didn’t have any test renders from the time – as it is, this (from the unedited final render) shows the rendered water quite similarly to the test render (only difference is slight change of colour).
So, there you have it. Nice realistic water. Surprisingly effective for such a straightforward method – the only real hiccough I had was with the actual creation of subdivs on the water, and that’s purely because of the unusual shape of the pool. The marble blockwork on the pool sides as shown in that excerpt of the final render was very much inspired by the ArtScience Museum pool.
The PoolWater material created by following the tutorial. I opted not to use a bump – it’s to be expected than a shallow, still pool like this is not going to be nearly as rippled as a large swimming pool, so the bump would be of minimal importance in my opinion. I put the subdivs waaaaay down from the crazy high 256 that he uses – I’m rendering from a laptop after all, not bleeding Industrial Light and Magic
Next post: final materials and rendering!
Stuart McInnes 
