Attached are two screen captures. The upper one shows this model with a ground plane with a material, Water, Rippled, attached in a viewport. The lower one shows the result of rendering that same viewport. The render is stopped after a few samples.
The lighting is the sun coming from behind the viewer and fairly low to the horizon, as if the sun is getting close to the horizon behind him.
The background is an HDRI set to spherical projection and rotated so the brightest spot in the image is in the same place as the sun is set (eg, behind the viewer)
My questions are
a) How do I get the ground plane in the rendered view to become darker as it approaches the horizon, like it does in the rendered viewport?
b) Is there a feature to allow the materials on the hull and superstructure to reflect the clouds in the HDRI background?
c) How do I get the amplitude of the waves in the render to match that in the viewport?
This will happen after the answer to your second question. You can also enable ‘focal blur’ in the properties panel when nothing is selected. This will make the horizon line created from the infinite ground plane less sharp in the render.
Change the environment used for reflections to the same one used for the visible backdrop in the Rendering panel.
Unfortunately, bump intensity in Rendered display mode will need to use a different intensity value versus Raytraced mode or the Render command. The lighting, object and bump texture map are all factors as well but in general the intensity will need to be less in Rendered mode.
These tips worked well. I may not have stated my case adequately in the matter of wave amplitude. I want the final rendered image to more closely resemble the viewport render (eg, make the final waves look higher).
Also, I have two models in which the same gloss navy paint material reflects differently. The one shown in these two jpgs works the way I would like. The other one shows no reflection, no matter how I set the reflection in the Render Properties dialog. It never reflects the HDRI, no matter what angle I look at the model from.
