Water Prim Texturing

[Wolfen Greggan]

Working on a large water tank project for a customer. They want to be able to walk into the water but asked why the texture vanishes when they are inside the prim. I explained that textures go on the outside faces and when inside the prim you aren't looking at hose faces, but they really want it to look like Linden water so I told them I'd ask if there was a way to do it. Anyone know if this is possible?

[Rolig Loon]

It's a little wasteful of prims, but I have occasionally put a gridwork of flat textured prims into an area like that so that a visitor is always seeing one or more of them no matter which direction s/he looks.  It's especially effective if you want to make a place look totally black, like an unlit closet, but you can get a decent underwater effect with translucent prims too.  Link them and set to physics shape type CONVEX_HULL to save 50% on L.I.

[Wolfen Greggan]

Thanks. I'll ask if my customer wants to sacrifice prims for the effect.

[ChinRey]

You could always do multiple layers as a single mesh or sculpt to save land impact.

But you shold be aware that you'll never ever emulate Linden water perfectly. No matter how tight you pack those sheets, you'll never completely eliminate the "layered" look. And of course, all those transparent layers on top of each other will probably cause some aplha bug issues and also make it hard to click on anything inside the tank. Don't know of those problems are relevant in this particular case.

[namssab1nad Piers]

The least primy way to to do it is to make  a copy of the tank just slightly smaller and texture it and use a color similiar to looking through water and place it inside the larger tank.... it will then give almost the effect of looking through linden water.  If you go underwater somewhere and rez a cube.. you will notice you have to be around 10 meters away from the cube before you start to see a "color" effect on the cube as if looking through water.  Being a water tank, which is probably much smaller than 10 meters in diameter, the color effect under Linden water would be negligible anyway.  You can increase the effect inside the tank by making the "water color" a darker semi transparent shade of water.  

[Wolfen Greggan]

Thanks for the tips. The tank is 35 x 18 x 10 so not small. I tried making a sculpted grid but I couldn't get the water texture to work with it. After consulting the customer we decided to use a hollow prim so the water texture can be seen on the sides from the inside and outside. Not ideal but the best that can be expected I suppose.