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Discover how Johan Vikstrom worked with water, wet surfaces, and light reflections to create this realistic render

This project was a journey for me to explore parts of the creation process I have very little experience with, namely caustics, water and wet surfaces.To increase the challenge even further, I didn’t want to use a reference; usually I like to work with a movie frame or a photo, which I try to mimic. I had made a digital human asset, Emily, before from the Wikihuman project files, and I had refined her shaders and textures through a few projects.So I thought she would be the perfect asset to use – she didn’t have a body or wet hair, but I could solve that later on.

My idea was to use caustics to light the character, as I felt that could be a unique approach.Over the next few pages I will go through the process I used to create this image.

01 BUILD THE POOL

The pool is a simple box with an edge around it. I used a tileable mosaic texture and a stone texture from cgtextures.com for the shaders. For the water I made a box with more subdivisions on the top.The water needs to be a closed surface to work correctly with the shaders, and the water geometry needs to be clipping slightly outside of the pool geometry. I used a texture deformer with the ocean shader to make the larger water displacement.