It would be lovely to have a single parametric waterfall with all the effects, but there isn't.
You must build it, and with the complex profile and wall tool in Archicad 11, it is feasible.
Our inventive colleague Frank Chin made an animated fountain that is freely available, but it remains cartoonish in effect.
A GDL tour-de-force, nontheless.
The trick to a good waterfall, i suspect, is attention to detail - and several material surfaces, both opaque and transparent, applied to overlapping elements to exaggerate complexity.
This would be an artistic challenge. I imagine that if it was a fairly architectural water cascade, the water would roll over a level precipice. You could make several curved and wavy complex profiles and apply them to several overlapping wavy walls. Use the water shader in LightWorks for this.
At the bottom of the spillway, there would be foam on a level plane - a slab perhaps, colliding with mesh elements at that level. You'd need to have several overlapping meshes [DNC's sea object, for instance or the "Water" object in our library] with different foam/wave shader combinations and at different amplitudes to create the multitude of effects a realistic cascade might have.
I've had success with translucency or partial obscuring by duplicating a mesh, elevating the copy and placing a perforated material on the copy. This creates a depth effect that could make foam look translucent.
Dwight Atkinson
