Got Water ?
Blitz3D Forums/Blitz3D Beginners Area/Got Water ?
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| So how do you guys do water in your games? I need an example of water that is moving, but nothing radical like the ocean. I have seen samples in the code archs but 2 issues arose. 1. People say that the shiny-smooth cube map water is to unrealistic. 2. Having a large plane and a smooth scrolling animated water texture is great except where it meets the terrains it looks very unrealistic. Any ideas or tricks (smoke and mirrors hehe) on how to do water in B3D ? thx all :) |
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| cube mapped water looks great if done right.. You could also use a 3rd party lib like fast extension which works very well imo |
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| Cubemap water might be state of the art, and look great if it isn't exaggerated (= low alpha). but it's also rather slow. In theory you need to do 5 renders to get your uptodate cubemap every frame, or at least after every 10th or so frame. Using a static cubemap isn't very exciting. IMHO it depends on the situation. What is is used for? A river? A coast? A little lake? A pool? I'd suggest to use an animated texture. For example in a room where drops are falling from the ceil it looks pretty good to have those concentric circle animations on the water - no need for cubemaps. A coast looks great with a ground that fades smoothly to turkis, the deeper it gets (see various "tropic" ambiance games). Get some good water animations. In a river it looks amazing when you use the right scrolling speed and water color, even with a static texture. Anyone remember Hitman 1, the river in the jungle level? In a project of mine I also applied the water animation to the ground (as additional texture layer), so it looks like water caustics. But that's only important when the player can dive under water. Personally I wouldn't use Cubemaps since the performence hit is much more significant than the optical effect, compared to a good animated texture. And to add the right enviroment sounds helps a lot too. |
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| ..what I use to do with B3D when water is on scene is 2 things..if I have water in pool, what i did is animated texture, prepared in such way that when played looking like refracted swimming pool underwater texture, and cubemaps with very small resolution 64x64 or 128x128, for reflective plane, with transparency 0.55-0.6 ... I had supergreat results, very fast and always looked pretty much realistic... |
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| Well I've tried cube mapping and a standard ted style animated texture. Cube mapping slowed down my game far too much, but it looked great. Plane with anim texture looked "ok" but did not slow down my game at all. So, anyone have any links to a good anim water texture for like a pool, or lake? thx |
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