Get one step closer to make realistic renders

Creating realistic renders is something almost every 3D artist is craving for. For years we work our butts off just to learn this skill, and there is a lot to learn. There are many "secrets" when it comes to creating realistic renders, in this tutorial I will show you one of them and, and not just how to do it, but to do it extremely fast and easy.

From the title of this tutorial, you can already guess it, I'm talking about Wet Maps. I can't tell you how many astonishing renders I have seen with a river or a lake in it and a huge number, almost all of them, have a dry shore. So why is it, that incredibly skilled artists just ignore this detail?

If you don't know what a wet map is I'll explain it quickly. I prepared a simple scene as an example.

In order to create a wet map for the ground material you need to do the follow:

- Make a wet version of the material, I'll show you later how to do it.

- UV Unwrap the ground plane and make a completely white texture for it.

- In texture paint mode use a black brush and paint everything that is supposed to be wet. (This black and white texture is the wet map)



- Mix your normal shader and the wet shader and use the wet map as the mix factor.