Making Water in 3DMax

I prepared an example file which includes a sample 3DMax
material for water with ripples. Right click  here 
and save the link to download this file. Then feel free to copy 
the material into your project from the file. If you read below,
it is not much of a job to make the same material from scratch
by yourself, too.

The name of my material is WATER_MAT, which is applied
to a single rectangle named POOLWATER. A few things
to be mentioned about this material if you want to use it
for your project.

1. WATER_MAT is a RAYTRACE material which applies
   the procedural map, WATER, as a BUMP map.
   Likewise, in your project, the water should just be a
   simple surface. If you come from  Lightscape, do not include
   this surface when you make a solution file.
   In other words, just add this surface in
   3DMax directly from AutoCAD (or build it in 3DMax).
   If your system does not have the procedural map,
   WATER, an alternative is to use the procedural map,
   NOISE, instead. If you carefully adjust its scale
   factors, it can make a pretty good emulation.

2. To see the ripples of the water, you need
   something that the water surface can reflect.
   If you have nothing that your water reflects, you
   will not see the ripples on the water surface well. 
   You see what I mean if you examine the image below.
   Unless I have the roof, the ripples would not be seen.
 
   The reflected object does not have to be such a roof.
   It can be the wall of the building by the water pool,
   or even the cloud pattern mapped on the sky. 
   If you want to change the degree of reflection
   on the surface of the water, go to the definition
   of WATER_MAT material in 3DMax Material Editor, and 
   change the value for REFLECT parameter in the
   Raytrace_Basic_Parameters section as below. I set
   this value to be 30% reflective.


3. To change the look of the ripples, bring up the
   RIPPLE-MAP section applied in the Bump map of
   the WATER_MAT (circled red in the screendump above). 
   Many parameters are there, but
   it is likely that you need to modify Wave_radius
   and Amplitude under Water_Parameters section.
   The Wave_radius is the radius of the sphere used
   to generate the water pattern, and depending on
   the measurement unit of your model, you need to
   adjust this value. My model uses feet and inches
   and this value is set to 40000. The Amplitude
   changes the calmness of the water. See the images
   below to see what happens if you change this value.


 Amplitude = 0.01
 Amplitude = 0.06
 Amplitude = 0.25 
 Amplitude = 4.00

4. The RIPPLE_MAP comes with animation of the ripples.
   This feature probably does not work if you try to copy
   my material into VIZ, though.            
   I have set it to a speed that works for my model, but
   you may change it if you like. To animate the ripples
   of water, what is needed is to animate the Phase 
   parameter in the definition of the RIPPLE-MAP
   (circled red in the screendump above). Notice
   that the value of Phase parameter changes when you
   move the frames by scrolling the animation bar.
   To animate this parameter, just like a camera animation,
   set it a value at frame 0 first, and then go to another
   frame and set a different value. If you want to change
   the speed of the ripples by doing this, first, make 
   sure to delete the animation I set.
   (My experience says a good speed is to increment 
    the Phase value by 1 for every 3 seconds.)

5. This water tends to take a good amount of time to render.
   If you want to speed up the rendering, try disabling the
   "Raytrace Refractions" option in the "Raytracer Control"
   section of WATER_MAT. (Be careful. Do NOT disable the
    "Raytrace Reflections" instead.)
   This will make the rendering significantly faster while
   keeping the good quality of the look of water surface.
   The only thing you are likely to loose by doing this is 
   the distortion of the image of the bottom of the water.

6. For more detailed information about this procedural map
   for WATER, see the 3DMax online help.