December 13, 2011, 10:19:08 pm
The water and ocean would require the same technique as reflective floors, ie planar reflections which work just like a mirror. You then add blurring and/or distortion depending on which material effect you want.
Lumion currently uses a single cubemap for all reflective materials, eg, water, ocean, reflective floor materials and glass. The cubemap is a 360 degree panorama texture rendered from the camera position which is then projected onto all reflective materials. The method is somewhat limited in terms of realism, so as I mentioned in the other post, Ferry has told me that after the initial v2 release they first want to experiment with per-object cubemaps, and after that they would like to investigate options for planar reflections - preferably without crippling performance too much.