So I’m trying to make a water material and following a basic tutorial I’ve ended up with this:
Now, this seems to work (kinda), as seen here:
Except that when I increase the scale of the plane (and the Tiling parameter in the material instance) to 10, it seems to become lighter, as seen here:
And when I increase the scale to 100 it becomes even more noticeable:
And when I go to 1000, it’s completely washed out:
Now, I have two questions: 1 - Why is that happening? 2 - How can I make it so that the tiling adjusts automatically when the plane is resized instead of having to adjust the Tiling parameter in the material instance every time?
Any insight would be greatly appreciated.
I didn’t even know you could change the tiling on the base color. How would I go about that?
Are you changing the tiling on the base color also? You need to keep it in step with the normal.
There’s no avoiding changing the tiling when you change the mesh size I’m afraid. To be fair, it’s something you setup once and leave, it’s not like you’re constanly inserting new pieces of water 
You’ll find it a lot less hassle if you’re working with a material instance, you can twiddle params then without any recompiles.
Exactly the same as the normal, you have to keep them in sync…
I don’t know if I’m stupid or there’s been a miscommunication… maybe I should clarify that all that’s plugged into base color is a simple vector parameter, and I have no idea what I should do with that. Am I doing it wrong?
Alas, no joy. I’m thinking I should give it up and just buy some water solution off the marketplace. As it happens I was looking at Waterline PRO and happened upon a review from you, so maybe you could share some insight on that. I have two main concerns: 1 - Does it play nice with dynamic lighting (I’m thinking in particular about underwater, like if there are any effects that might cause weird artifacts during a day/night cycle)? 2 - Does it come with some sort of solution to make “holes” (I have some tunnels inland that would fall below the waterline, so I would have to remove the water from there somehow)?
Anyway, thanks for the help, much appreciated.
Ah… I can’t see that from here. Let me think a bit more…
BTW that lerp on the normals isn’t doing anything, you have nothing plugged into the alpha… 
Right, I think you’re problem may be the refraction param. You might need to fiddle with that, or better still, actually plug a fresnel node into that area ( which is what it’s supposed to be ).
Just search for Fresel and plug it in there, you should get some joy without any parameters in it…
Ah, a market solution will be streets ahead of something cobbled together from a tutorial, that’s for sure.
WL Pro with dynamic, no problem. In fact I think they assuming that. It’s a clever idea and works well. Like I say, I only use it for the top layer, but it has 3 if you want it ( surface, edge and underwater ). You might be able to get away with WL lite, I don’t know.
Holes, no, not as far as I know. You’d have to use more than one actor in some way.
This one’s pretty good, and free:
