This is probably very easy to someone good at Maya, but I'm rather new at it, and am stuck on making a simple realistic water background.
So I actually did a tutorial already, I followed this one right to the letter: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ABSgzJI6p3g
because I don't need to make moving water really, mayb a little sway, but mainly the water is background. I'm animating a lotus, in fact, a model I bought from turbosquid: http://www.turbosquid.com/3d-models/flower-3ds/439677
and while this model already has water in it, which I would actually like to use, it was built in 3d studio max, so when I open the .obj in maya, it loses all it's textures and whatnot. So I guess another question would be, is there a way around that? And do you have any ideas on how to make water that looks like that? I will upload the render of what I made so you can see how my water looks like vs the one in the Youtube tutorial and maybe you can tell me what i did wrong? Mainly the refraction aspect isn't showing in mine. Maybe I could even send you the project to take a look at? Mainly it's important for me to get the reflections, shadows and the refractions.
Here is the render: http://www.planetdisco.tv/video/Lotus\_w\_stuff\_water.qt it's rather large so give it a minute to load. (200megs)
and the only reasons you can see the stems through the water is because I actually lowered the transparency to try to fake the effect the tutorial was getting.
Oh and that circle around the main lotus flower on the water is being caused by a spot light above (anyway to atleast fix that?)
Lastly, what mode should I render in? I can't render w Maya Software because it gets to about frame 100 and freezes. Maya Hardware renders it right out but I'm on a mac and heard that can cause dicey results. Mental ray will only render tga (well the only format the client can use out of the mental ray options) which produces frame by frame stills. So I could use lots of tips really!
Thanks in advance for any help.
(also see screenshot if you don't want to wait for the render to load) oh and I realize there will be some variation from the youtube tutorial because I used a different file for the texture, but mainly am concerned w reflections, shadows and refractions
![](/system/screenshots/307955/original/screen_shot.jpg?1305849567)