I am doing a project for school in which i need to create a new book cover to the book “The Pearl”. Most people are just drawing theirs, but I wanted to do it in 3dsm. I have my entire underwater scene modeled out, but now i am trying to add an underwater effect to it. I was thinking of just making a plane that is offset to the ground, giving it a water colored shell and setting the opacity so you can see through it. I tried that, but it hasnt seemed to work yet. Either I just get some weird blue streaks going though it, or it looks like the actual sand is blue.
Has anyone ever done anything like this before, and if so, how would I go about doing this?
Ask the people who made ‘Finding Nemo’ 
volumetric lighting works best
Unless you want to add a “ripple” effect, which typically works only when it’s a moving picture, I can’t think of a simple way to make something look like it’s underwater. I’d suggest composing the view so that some of the water’s surface is visible overhead, having the light source above that surface, and somehow making the entire volume of the scene filled with a nearly transparent bluegreen color. The “distance blueing” is probably the biggest clue that you’re looking through water, but I think a visible “ceiling” is going to help a lot.
I know I know. place the moniter in a plastic bag an sumerge it under water. If this does not work then I do not know what will
Seriosly I do not know. I have never used that program, but when it is done, will you post it? I would love to see it.
use volumetrix lighting.
basically you can just add a fog effect to the whole image. And set the density to a very low number. Then use a couple spotlights and point them at the ground and add some volumetric lighting to them. If you have the lights low enough and the fog high enough, if should work out great. Also u can add a couple bubbles by adding a particle array, and then selecting the bubble preset. You can then add a pre-existing raytrace bubble material from the material library and BAM a frigging realistic rendering!
Try out Dreamscape. It’s an excellent plugin for terrain and underwater, if you can shell out the cash.
if you don’t want to do that GI lighting thing…
hold on… am i forgetting something… there is some feature in mental ray that does this kinda light ripple effect … maybe i am confused…
but this is how to get that ripple effect w/o GI:
then what you can do is make kind of a foot ball shape and clone them so it looks like the picture except covers the entire top of your scene … make sure that it is kinda above your scene a good bit…
clone this large group and move it up some more and off set it some…
now apply like a 10-20 % opacity to these foot balls and place a light above it with shadows on… aand then you get a nice ocean wavy effect…
i used this in Max 3.1 before cuz i didn’t have any
I second the fog idea. Use a caustic effect with the lighting also, which would make the ripple-like light effect on the seafloor.
Ok, I’ve got some input & some questions… first off are you useing max six, if so you can utilize mental ray to do most of your underwater caustics effects… only thing is this takes a lot of processing power… Ok, for the underwater “look” use the fog effect thing, it works wonders, next for the caustics you can use one of two things, a light above the entire scene that projects a picture of caustics down onto the scene, or thru mental ray. To do it thru mental ray, make a plane above your scene and add a noise and a wave modifier to it to give it that wavey watery look, next go to your renderer by pressing f10 and go down to the bottom to assign renderer, click on default scanline and change it to mental ray. now go into your material editor (m) and change the material to a watery looking material, i’ll give a specific one later… assign that material to the plain, now you’re ready for the fun part… to add caustics to your scene, select the plain and right click on it to go into it’s properties, go to mental ray properties and make sure that generate caustics is selected. Now click ok and go back into your render rollout, go to renderer properties(i think that’s what it’s called…) and go down to caustics, turn them on… you’re almost done, i’ll post the rest on here once i look at it and get some values for what you’re doing, but without it in front of me that’s what i’ve got off the top of my head 
I found a specific texture, you can use a raytrace texture and make it look like water, or use lume glass they look pretty good
You could always use a projected caustic lightmap light and add volumetric fog to it.
Like, the light is projecting the image/movie of a caustic effect.
As I recall, there’s a nice caustic looping animation in one of the maps directories.
