I'm currently working on an underwater scene. With firefly I could add a black and white image map to a spotlight to create a wave like pattern all over the scene, like in this image: https://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/under-water/2406980/?p The possibility to attach maps to a light to create this seems not to exist in Superfly. Is there another method to create an effect like this?

Check out BB's tricks here.

https://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/?thread_id=2914611&#msg4309620

I have, but the thread seems not to answer my question. Or maybe I'm missing something.

In SuperFly, I place a plane between the light source and the scene. On this plane, I manipulate transparency using a procedural or, better, a water caustic texture. I have never found a poser node setup that can make realistic water caustics - plausible but not worth the trouble.

Have a look at this (quick, before they close the site!) https://forum.smithmicro.com/topic/9078/gobos-in-superfly

I just doodled this together this morning.

To make the caustics, first I placed a sunlight (infinite) in the scene with intensity 1600% (Yes you read that correctly, 1600%)

To get the shadows accurate you should set the Shadow Blur Radius to .5, but you can manipulate that for "art" if you want.

I grabbed the black-and-white image from this page: https://www.filterforge.com/forum/read.php?TID=12886

On my water caustics gobo plane, I set up this shader, using that image.

On that shader, the Clouds are used to make the tiled pattern irregular, distorting it just enough to hide the fact that it's just a 256-pixel square repeated over and over.

The Math_Functions_5 value is adjusting the ratio of those caustics to the overall light level. At .97 there's a nice balance focused vs. unfocused light. Increase closer to 1 to have less unfocused light. Lower it to have more light. Adjust your light intensity as you see fit for the circumstances. Remember, we don't have an exposure control for cameras in Poser (why? makes no sense) so instead we have to put knobs on our lights and set them to crazy things like 1600%.

There's a Poser box, scaled up to enclose my scene. This is the water volume. Here it is shown from above.

Here shown from the front.

Here's the shader for the water box. This sets up the blue tint of water that develops over great distances, and also sets up some particulate matter to scatter the light. The scatter produces the "God Rays".

This is the render WITHOUT the water box producing the volume effect. We have caustics but visibility is 100% clear and not at all what it's like under water.

This is the render WITHOUT the gobo plane. The pieces work TOGETHER, not alone.

Thank you very much, that#s awesome!

I've been working on an underwater scene in Superfly, P11, and using this method for caustics and godrays, but I'm having trouble fine-tuning the caustic ratio. For a while I couldn't get it to work at all and then just on a whim I plugged the math node used to invert the image directly into the transparency and suddenly I could see the caustics. For some reason, that Add box messes me up, and I've tried every adjustment from .097 (very blown out, ouch) to .99999 (nearly black). All it does is adjust my overall light level but the moment I plug that box in, caustics go away entirely. I even tried changing my measurement interface and that did not seem to make much difference. I'm wondering if the scale of the scene isn't what's affecting things somehow. I have no environment sphere in place, since it didn't look like one was used in the example above. Infinite light at 1500%, 1% size, shadow blur at .5 which produces a rather fuzzy caustic--.2 produces a much sharper one but then I'm back to square one with trying to modulate the caustic ratio. I have my gobo plane just above the frame of my render, as low as I could put it, practically on top of my shadow box. What am I missing?

I'm an idiot. I had the inversion node plugged into the bottom value of the Add node. facepalm After a few more false starts, like reverting my scene to make that fix after going way offroad with other experiments and typing "97" in instead of .97, I've finally got it working. Caustics still look weird but I'm pretty sure the height and width of my gobo have something to do with that. An easy fix is changing the shadow blur radius but I don't want to do that since .5 is accurate for sunlight. This seems to be such fiddly, variable stuff.

Another great wizardry by BB! :D This is fun to play with! :D To solve the repetitious tiling of the gobo, I used Genetica to make a set of assymetrical seamless caustic tiles and then set up a scrambler material; the colors represent areas where each of the four caustic tiles appear; the black grid shows how big a caustic tile is.

Superfly render settings, with volume samples and volume bounces:

Superfly render:

Zip with the seawater box, seafloor terrain, gobo, and the texturing image maps [undersea godray kit]

Thank you so much! When you are rendering these, do the caustic patterns sort of slowly fade in over time or should they be apparent at the beginning of a test render? I don't have GPU rendering so this is gonna take me a while and I don't know whether my failure to see the caustics is a problem with my own sea floor or my lighting.

Rendering with progressive mode enabled, as soon as the first sample displays, you should see the caustic pattern on the ground; the godrays only resolve gradually. I am rendering only with the CPUs (two Xeon X5690 processors, 24 total threads at 3.46GHz). My old Quadro FX5800 video card is not suitable for rendering this in GPU. If you are using your own seafloor, water box, and gobo, then it may be a matter of adjusting the tiling scale of the caustic image maps to fit your models. If you have not yet downloaded the undersea godray kit linked in my previous post, try using that.

Is your light above the gobo, so that the light has to pass through the gobo to reach the water box? the gobo should be above the water box, but below the light; generally, you'd want to use an infinite light, rather than a spot, area, or point light. Don't have other lights in the scene, as they will wash out the godray streaks. I do have other lights in the shot I posted, but they are used in such a way as to avoid destroying the godray effect.

I only have the one infinite light as BB mentions above, 1600% intensity, 10% size, .5 shadow blur radius. I figured out how to make the caustics show up, by resetting my shadow blur radius to 0. Too sharp on that, but if I bring it up past .005 it's too fuzzy to see at all. Not sure why. I am using your volume box and gobo as loaded straight from my prop library. It can't be a scale difference thing, I'm using poser native units as well.