Making Ocean And Water in Carrara

Once you use Carrara, theres no looking back on Daz Studio or Poser. Trust me, I started with Poser but found it frustrating, then played around with Daz studio and finally I discovered Carrara. If there was anything better than Carrara for handing Daz and Poser content then I would be using it. It does so many things but with so many features comes the learning curve and effort to get really good at it.

There’s a bucket load of post production work in that image,

As far as I can see,. the water drips are Photoshop brushes which is the easiest way to do a complex water effect.
the Water colour is driven by the reflection of the background “sky” image, which is possibly the most important part of the image.

If you want to create the cresting wave behind the figure, you’ll need to model it, then you could either add the breaking spray by using a particle system, or take the easier route and add that in post.

For the ocean,. in carrara,. If you have Carrara Standard,. or Pro, you can use an infinite plane with a watery shader (see exampe shaders included with Carrara)
If you have Carrara Pro, then you can use the Ocean primitive,. Or,.. use Brian Orca’s Ocean plugin

The Ocean Primitive is a Sub-Division primitive (like the terrain) but,. with a controllable “Wave” animation system

The default Ocean resolution, uses pretty low values, to make it faster to work with and render.
the default size is also pretty small,. but both of these can be increased to create a larger and more detailed body of water.
However,. the larger and more detailed surface will also take more time and processing,..

So,..
Another method is to use the “Replicator” to create a grid of ocean primitives, ... there’s a option in the Replicator settings to make the objects “tile seamlessly”  and this allows you to create a Medium scale ocean primitive, with medium detail,. but extend that for miles in you scene, without the overhead of using a large scale,. full detail ocean.

The geometry of the ocean will play a part as 3dage mentioned, but also the shaders as has also been mentioned. Since the geometry in Carrara is basically just a skin with no volume, you need shaders to give that effect.

Joemama touched on some of the more complex shader options you may need to give the illusion of depth. Freznel effects are one component. The others are refraction and under transparency, Absorption and In-Scattering. I wish I could tell you where to start with those effects, but so much of it is dependent on the camera angle in relation to the water and also the lighting. This is where I’ll disagree with Joemama: Lighting and shaders work hand in hand in Carrara. What may work in one scene under certain lighting conditions may not work in another with different lighting conditions. Not all ocean scenes are in a brightly lit Caribbean setting, so what works in one of those scenes may not work if you’re trying to show a rocky coastline in the North Atlantic.