Q:
this is pretty cool
how did U make such a realistic water cutoff ?
A:
I had pictures of a real beach where there was a very hard cutoff
between the light blue and the deep sea. I wanted to simulate the effect
- I created a mask file in Autodesk Animator 1.0. It was half black -
half white with a freehand line inbetween. Then I used the SOFT filter
over the whole picture to smooth the cutoff. The file was only 320x200
GIF and as I tried to use it as a mask map to control the blue color of
the seaground, it got pixelated at rendering resolution of 1024x768! I
had two choices - drawing it again at higher resolution in Photoshop or
Animator Pro, or softing it even more with the mapping blur filter in
the Material Editor. I set the blur to almost 100 (default 7!!!) and...
you see the result. I liked it so much that I left it this way...
Addition
For the waves, I created a black&white image in Autodesk Animator using the Spray tool. I mapped this image on a rectangle as opacity map.