Turbulent

Turbulent creates high-quality, realistic water from simple geometry with no need for simulations or geometry nodes meaning that render times are low and viewport performance is fast and smooth.

The Turbulent system is a set of shader nodes for your water and ground objects. The nodes create wetness effects on the ground and complex faceted water effects which react and adapt to the ground.

Your download also includes the Turbulent Manager addon which makes setup and baking the necessary texture maps quick and easy.

Installation Instructions

To install the addon: (click here for a video demo)

1. In Blender, click on Edit, then Preferences.
2. Click on Addons, then Install.
3. Browse to your downloaded turbulent_manager.py file, select it, and click Install.
4. Enable the addon.
5. The Turbulent Manager will appear in the Materials tab of the Properties panel.

Add Turbulent to your Scene

Before using the Manager to setup your scene for Turbulent, please apply any Scale and Rotation to your Water object.

Append the nodes:

1. In the Manager, click on Import Turbulent.
2. Browse to your downloaded .blend file, select it, and click Import Turbulent.

Setup the planes:

1. Select your Water object.
2. Click on Prepare Scene. The manager will create 4 objects (Ground Data Plane, Ground Bake Plane, Water Bake Plane, and a Water Height Coord empty) and add them to a new Collection named Turbulent Planes.
3. The Ground Data Plane must be fitted to your ground geometry objects. See this video for a good example of how to do this. It can be done with Face Project snapping in Edit Mode or with a Shrinkwrap modifier for a single ground object.

Bake Ground data:

1. Select the Ground Data Plane and Ground Bake Plane.
2. Click on Bake Ground Data.

Bake Water data:

1. Select the Ground Data Plane, your Water object, and the Water Bake Plane.
2. Click on Bake Water Data.

Prepare ground object materials:

1. Select all your Ground objects and your Water object.
2. Click on Setup Ground Materials.

To paint your Flow maps in Blender with no need for 3rd party apps, I recommend Flow Map Painter by Clemens Beute available here on Gumroad. He makes it available for free but, if you do download and use it, please consider paying him as much as you feel the software is worth. It is a great little addon, robust with many features and it offers us flow map painting directly onto our geometry and all without ever leaving Blender. That's value!