I spent ages trying to hand-paint and animate a waterfall yesterday, before learning about the Plasma effect. I found a few different threads on the site talking about creating waterfalls with Plasma, but sadly none of them have working .CAP downloads anymore.
So! Here's something I've put together quickly!
Plasma Waterfall .CAP
I saw
and thought the waterfall looked gorgeous, and have been trying to replicate it. Hand painting... didn't work out too well <img src="smileys/smiley17.gif" border="0" align="middle"> but I'm hoping to get pretty close with this Plasma method.
I used this image as the source texture, as the waterfall in the above video has some white lines at the top that stay fairly static. Seems to give a sense of direction and turbulence to the water.
<img src="http://i216.photobucket.com/albums/cc212/darkstorne/source.jpg" border="0">
I flipped the angle of the Plasma effect under the 'Common' settings so that it flowed downwards, and played around with the opacity and speed settings as you can see in the .CAP. The colours are nothing special yet - I'd like to find a way to get a turquoise-y colour coming through from behind. Until I'm rendering on top of some actual textures instead of a black background though, I'm not putting much thought into the colours.
The particles at the bottom were thrown on pretty quickly for extra effect, but they look more like magic sparkles than spray/foam at the moment. I blurred them and slapped on some glow effects.
What do you think? Any suggestions to make it look more watery?