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Shorah everyone,

I'm working on my very first Age and bumped into a lot of problems with my waveset... Now I understand that it may not be very wise to start Age building directly with a waveset, but perhaps you are willing to point me in the right direction...?

The sea floor is just an ordinary plane. For the waveset, I duplicated the sea floor, moved it a little higher and called it "Golfvlak". (I also made an emty object for the wind direction, but it's hard to spot on the screenshot).

Here is my AlcScript:

Code: Select all

Golfvlak:
   type: waveset
   visual:
      waveset:
            geostate:
                maxlen: 25
                minlen: 5
                ampoverlen: 0.009999999776
                chop: 0.25
                angledev: 0.3490658402
            texstate:
                maxlen: 12
                minlen: 1
                ampoverlen: 0.04999999702
                chop: 0.25
                angldev: 0.8203047514
            ripplescale: 75
            specnoise: 0.5
            specstart: 250
            specend: 1000
            depthrange:
                opac:
                    start: -7
                    end: -11
                refl:
                    start: 0
                    end: 1
                wave:
                    start: 0
                    end: 1
            wispiness: 1
            edgeopac: 1
            edgeradius: 3
            period: 0.75
            fingerlength: 1.519999981
            envrefresh: 0.3000000119
            envradius: 2000
         winddir: Wind
         windspeed: 0.1

The default opac settings from the Wiki didn't work (the waveset would be completely invisible), so I entered the z coordinate of the waveset for "start" and the z coordinate of the sea floor for "end". I don't know if I did that right ...
The problem is that nothing happens in Uru with the waveset. There are no reflections and no ripples. I hope you can point me in the right direction, because I have no idea how to get it to work.

The surface of a waveset is at the Z-position of the object centre. The mesh should describe the bottom of the body of water, telling the shader the depth at any given spot - the opacity, reflectivity and waveheight are scaled by this depth, so that their effect is weaker in shallow water than in deep.

From the picture, it looks like your waveset mesh is level with the object centre, meaning the water depth is zero. If you go into edit mode and move the mesh down to the cave floor (leaving the object centre were it is) you should see some effect.

...or so I hope, good luck! :)

Keep us posted, I've been having waveset headaches myself so I'm curious to see how this pans out.

Jojon wrote:From the picture, it looks like your waveset mesh is level with the object centre, meaning the water depth is zero. If you go into edit mode and move the mesh down to the cave floor (leaving the object centre were it is) you should see some effect.

Thanks that worked! I lowered the mesh to the floor and the waveset was still at the same height in the game... However, initially the waveset was invisible until I started tweaking some settings. I set the start value for opac to 0 and the end value to -6 (the sea floor is 6 units below the object centre), but apparently I misunderstood how this parameter works... How do I know which values to use?
I also tweaked the refl values so that the sea kept more of its original color (it was bright white at first), but that was just by trial and error.

So my next question: how to know which values to use for opac, refl and wave? Of course that depends on what you want it to look like, so a general explanation of what those settings actually do is also welcome.

Another question... The cave is quite bright, though I made sure that the sun doesn't shine into it (I placed the sun behind the cave as you can see in the screenshot in my first post)... I presume I should change one of the material settings, but which one? Or does the sun shine through the cave walls?

Thanks in advance!

Make sure you have "Shadeless" turned ON for the cave´s material ... and then you can control its brightness with the Amb slider ( 1=brightest 0=darkest ... try 0.5 to start )

Erik wrote:The cave is quite bright, though I made sure that the sun doesn't shine into it (I placed the sun behind the cave as you can see in the screenshot in my first post)... I presume I should change one of the material settings, but which one? Or does the sun shine through the cave walls?

Yes it does! Things, including cave walls, do not cast shadows in Plasma (unless you enable, or forget to disable, dynamic shadows, but that is not recommended for static geometry as it impacts performance). Surfaces that face towards a light source will be illuminated by it, no matter whether they are in a cave or not. You need to fake the shadow from the cave ceiling somehow, as Bob suggests.

To reduce the illumination of the avatar, you can put a lamp softvolume around the cave. (If you need the brightness outside of the cave - otherwise you just make the sun weaker. Speaking of which, your avatar looks very brightly illuminated. What is your sun energy? Keep in mind that anything above 0.5 will result in clamped colors (which is not obvious because the clamping happens before the texture is applied, but the shading will not be realistic).)

Erik wrote:So my next question: how to know which values to use for opac, refl and wave? Of course that depends on what you want it to look like, so a general explanation of what those settings actually do is also welcome. :)

I have never managed to figure this out either. My current theory, which still doesn't seem to work as well as I'd like :), is that the start and end values describes the depth range (in feet, positive values), within which the effect scales -- at every point that is shallower than the start value, the effect is zero and wherever it is deeper than the end value the effect is at max, in between, you've got a "gradient". Please do share your own experiences and findings. :)

Erik wrote:Another question... The cave is quite bright, though I made sure that the sun doesn't shine into it (I placed the sun behind the cave as you can see in the screenshot in my first post)... I presume I should change one of the material settings, but which one? Or does the sun shine through the cave walls?

Yes it does: by default all lights are assigned to every object and no surface obscures the light for another, unless it is set to cast dynamic shadows (which you generally do not want to do, since that is rather computing heavy), so the inside of a house is still fully lit by the sun. To avoid this, you can create a group with references to every light source that should affect the materials for your interiors and make the materials exclusively use the lights in this group. You do this in Shading->Material->Shaders, by highlighting the "Exclusive" button and referring to the group in question in the text input gadget next to it. If you do not need dynamic lighting, you can do what Boblishman suggested.

Thanks for the help!

I spent all day tweaking my waveset, and I've just promised myself to be happy with the end result... Hope you like it:

Link: Final waveset

Erik wrote:Thanks for the help!

I spent all day tweaking my waveset, and I've just promised myself to be happy with the end result... Hope you like it:

Link: Final waveset

Awesome waveset. Working all day on that was well worth it. I give it two thumbs up.

Awesome