Wavesets

[Branan]

It's possible neither of you did anything different, and TheMagician just got lucky in which order Plasma rendered his surfaces.

[andylegate]

Well there's got to be a way to tell Plasma. The GoW Plugin for Blender does it with "Passindex" in the Object menu of Blender.

I've got a feeling we just haven't found it yet.........which is why I'm about to attempt making some shore foam in my little test Age and see what happens.........Just don't use the "Satan Unleashed" feature!!! ....

Those guys at Cyan have a good sense of humor.....

[TheMagician]

And yes, that is the case, Paladin ... when I move my plane above the waveset this is what happens:


Give me 15 minutes, I think I have an idea (how much I hate it to restart Uru over and over again just to test little changes of some parameters

[TheMagician]

Somehow I had this in the back of my head ... it was a classic case of RTFM

From the Plasma Plugin Documentation

DECAL
This Plasma material type gives you a method for easily attaching a decal to an existing texture.
1.Create coincident geometry for the decal (e.g., a plane).
2.Select Plasma Decal as the material, then from there you define the texture map as usual.
3.Link the decal geometry to a parent object. A decal's parent object can be another decal.

This has the same effect as putting both decals on the same parent object, except it also specifies which decal gets drawn first. Every decal must have a parent node, and thus be guaranteed a non-decal ancestor somewhere down the line (the exporter will warn you if this isn't the case).

To determine draw order for multiple decals on one object, Plasma looks at how many generations there are in the hierarchy between each decal and its first non-decal ancestor. Decals closer to the non-decal ancestor are drawn first (thus underneath) later children.

So after creating the Decal material it's important to use the "select and link" button

to link the Decal object to the base object (in this case the foam/ripples to the waveset object).

Here's the result:

(in this case I set blend mode to "add" because with "alpha" the decal was barely visible)

[andylegate]

I just hit on something....."Representation" and "Representation Group"

When you look in the Representation Group, you can add things to the group, and move the "Up" and "Down".........this looks a LOT like Passindex to me......Going to try something quickly.....

[TheMagician]

What is this representation group anyway?

[andylegate]

That's a good question, and it looks like my idea is a but. I was thinking this:

When making a waveset, we have to use the component manager and add a Representation. When we look at the Representaion in the Component Utils, we see it labled, Rep01 (you can rename it of course, but Rep01 is the default).

If we add another "Representation" to another object, it will be labled "Rep02"

Now we have a "Representation Group" that we also have to add to the waveset. When we look in Component Utils, we see that it wants us to add a "Representation", so we do, we add "Rep01" which is like a marker of sorts.

You can add other "Representations" to the "Representation Group". More, we can move which one is on top. We can put them in order, like if we had 3 we could go:

Rep01, Rep03, Rep02 if we wanted.

Since both "Representation" and "Representation Group" are both under the "Render" menu in the Component Manager, it just seemed to me that it was what we use in Blender as the "Passindex"

Still don't know if I'm wrong, but I do need to stop as I have to take my oldest son to the bus station. He's on his way down to Florida to visit his older sister and her husband.

I'll check back later tonight.

[TheMagician]

I guess I'll go to bed now.
I'm playing around with reflection settings (using a dynamic environment map).
Finally I get some results. But I can't get the reflection to line up properly with the surrounding objects.
Also there's the problem that the reflection seems to be projected in a circle onto the water surface which leaves these strange grey boarders in the corners of my water body.

[andylegate]

The reflections for wave sets are very dependent on on your reference object that you set in the Component Utils tab. You have to pick an object that is closest to the center of your wave set, and getting the amount of the radius is important too.

Even then, it still won't be perfect.

A good way to set that up, is to turn down the ripples of your waves as much as possible, to try and get the water surface as flat as possible, then you can adjust your numbers better for reflection.

Also, and I mention this since you said your enviorment map looks round: check the Plasma Layer you set up in the Materials Editor. You have like 3 or 4 different settings for your Enviormental Map: Screen, Square, Sphere and something else I think. I've had the best luck with Screen so far.