I've been trying to figure out a way to get an anchor chain to fade into nothingness like it would in water for a long time and I finally figured it out! The primivol stuff has helped quite a bit. I placed a fog primitive under the water plane which is completely black. I couldn't get this to work with the standard fog primitive! A simple trick and not an amazing render but it does produce the result I was shooting for! -Kix

Nice trick Kix! -TOXE

Did you try Distance Fog in the atmosphere setting?

Volumetrics, eh? That gives me another idea for some more SSS skin texturing.

Nice looking render , cool tip.

Neccessity is the mother of invention. Nicely done!

I didn't use a primivol solution but a number of repeated planes with the same transparency stacked above one another. Only problem with that solution is that you have a limit of say, 20 before Carrara's renderer calls it quits. (max ray depth) It worked pretty well also but this solution probably is better in that it isn't limited by the max ray depth. I'll have to keep this one in mind. You might want to add some Index of Refraction to the water surface.

misha123, I wanted to build a construct that would function like actual deep water. The distance fog setting would not work directionally (in other words, I wanted it only in the water). This setup will allow things to drop into the water and fade away or allow big critters with big teeth to be lurking in the water and come and get ya! This is a really simple example. Zekaric, you're absolutely right about the refraction. I left it out to simplify the experiment. -Kix

I was attracted by the subject line... I had my own small personal triumph the other day, in Atlanta at DragonCon. I managed to show a fellow artist who had been struggling with modeling in AnimationMaster how easy it was to make simple and complex shapes in Carrara's various modelers. He might just go for the CS3 boxes still available at low cost. Then I attended and participated in the Iron Artist, and won! Hooray for Dogwaffle. I had a small advantage perhaps - the topic given by the Photoshop rep was something luckily I had lots of experience in, space art that is. We had to use an image of a rocket and could use other images. I proceeded to make a planet, added an armada of spaceships, lots of special fx and animated the whole thing. Yep, that made the wow effect. so there ;-)