I would love to see a nice water material for a pool - with displacement and caustics. The problem is that it is (almost) impossible to see the caustics through the water surface when using "real" water.
- One workaround is to add an AGS layer to make the caustics visible. AGS makes the bottom surface and the caustics visible without distortions, and it's no longer physically correct.
- Another method is is the one used in the pool tutorial by Nuno Faria, with two water surfaces, where one is hidden from camera. This requiers two materials - one is water and the second is AGS, and both surfaces must be displaced or modeled as a water surface.
Here is a quick test with the first method. Material is basically 10% AGS + 90% water and a displacement layer. The model is just a plain surface. It is a simple method, but as you can see, the test is not very convincing: the AGS layer makes the floor tiles and the caustics visible -but not in the right positions...