Blender Modeling: Low Poly Water

Hello Blender Folks,

In this tutorial we are going to create Low Poly Water and render it in Cycles Rendering Engine inside Blender. This is what we are going to achieve today:

Open up a new Blender File, i.e the Default Scene with a cube, lamp and a camera as shown below.

Change to Cycles Render:

Go to the top Menu and change to Cycles Render from the Blender Render.

Delete the default cube:

Select the Cube and press X or Del key to delete it. You can also delete it from the Outliner Panel. Right click on the cube and select delete option.

Create a Plane:

Press Shift + A and select Mesh<Plane to add a plane or you can add it from the T Panel’s Create Tab. Rename this plane to “WaterLayer” in the Outliner. It is a good practice to rename your objects in the scene.

Scale the Plane:

Now scale this plane up-to the size of the Grid.

Subdivide the Plane:

Press Tab key to go into the Edit Mode and then Press W to open up Specials menu and select Subdivide. Now increase the number of cuts to 30 as shown.

You’d have achieved the following result.

Press Tab key once again to exit Edit Mode.

Create a Cloud Texture:

Go to the Texture Tab in the Properties Panel and create a New Texture and change it to Clouds and leave rest of the settings as default.

Add a Displace Modifier:

Go to the Modifier Tab in the Properties Panel and add a Displace Modifier and then select the Texture that we have just created. Change the Strength value to 0.100.

You can play around the settings till you are satisfied and get the result something as below.

Duplicate the Water Plane:

Press Shift+D to duplicate the water plane and then press Z and then move it down and scale it a bit till you get something like this.

Also don’t forget to rename this new plane to “WaterBed”.

[Optional: Subdivide the WaterLayer plane one more time to get a good view.]

Add Materials to both Planes:

Select WaterLayer plane and go to the Materials Tab. Add a new material. Rename this material to “WaterMaterial”.

Then select WaterBed plane and add a new material for this as well and rename it “BedMaterial”.

Change the setting of both the materials as following.

 

Change World Settings:

Go to the World Tab and change the color to very light grey or close to white. Make sure  Ambient Occlusion is unchecked.

Render:

Now just press F12 key or go to Render Tab and hit Render button. And we will get the following result.