Page 1 of 4

distorted waveset reflection

PostPosted: Wed Oct 07, 2009 12:44 pm
by Justintime9
After reading the wavesets tutorial, and testing it out, I've made a simple waveset for my age. There's only one problem:

Image

as you can see, the reflection of my building is far away on the horizon, rather than right next to the building that's being reflected, where it should be. On top of that, it's distorted at distance, an often gets all twisted and weird looking. Here's my AlcScript:

Code: Select all
RpondWav:
    type: waveset
    visual:
       waveset:
           envradius: 2100
           depthrange:
               opac:
                   start: 0
                   end: 10.5
           winddir: Wind
           windspeed: 0.4


my best guess is that I might've done the "Start and "end" wrong (as I'm still quite new to wavesets, I wasn't completely sure from the tutorial how to set the parameters.)

Re: distorted waveset reflection

PostPosted: Wed Oct 07, 2009 1:18 pm
by boblishman
no...its your object centre of the waveset ... that determins where the reflections are ... but, be warned, you'll never get them perfect .... even Cyan's are way off lots of times ...

Re: distorted waveset reflection

PostPosted: Wed Oct 07, 2009 3:29 pm
by Justintime9
Ok, My center was in the middle of the waveset, rather than near the building I want reflected correctly. I moved it so that it's right under my building, and while now it's not small and distant, it's way too huge, and extends to the horizon. Even if it didn't would it be even possible to make it reflect realistically?

Here's how it is now:

Image

Re: distorted waveset reflection

PostPosted: Sat Oct 10, 2009 8:31 am
by Jojon
If playing around with the envradius doesn't get you close enough, maybe you could fall back on the old upside-down-copy-of-the-building-beneath-the-surface trick?

Devs: Does the better reflective surfaces in the MystV build apply to wavesets too?

Re: distorted waveset reflection

PostPosted: Sat Oct 10, 2009 11:32 am
by Justintime9
Possibly, but it'd add alot of unnecessary verts. If I did though, how would I disable the building reflection? What should I set the envradius to if the object center is right below the building?

Re: distorted waveset reflection

PostPosted: Sat Oct 10, 2009 11:58 am
by Lontahv
Wavesets use the same reflection style in Myst5 and MOUL as they do in Prime and CompleteChronicles/PoTS.

When I was trying to get the Tre'bivdil water to look right, having a the radial waveset mesh helped the look.
trebivdil_waveset_mesh.jpg
trebivdil_waveset_mesh.jpg (109.38 KiB) Viewed 3711 times

Re: distorted waveset reflection

PostPosted: Sat Oct 10, 2009 2:55 pm
by Justintime9
The quality of the water looks alot better when it's a circular waveset. As far as the reflection, it's no longer distorted, but still way too big:

Image

The Envradius of that is 1000. I originally set it to 100 to see what it would look like, and the reflection was significantly smaller, however the range of the refection was just a relatively small circle, and had to be enlarged. Also, is there a way to get the reflection right under the building, rather than next to it, or on the horizon?

Re: distorted waveset reflection

PostPosted: Sat Oct 10, 2009 10:33 pm
by Nadnerb
You are trying to do something that wavesets were not designed to handle. Wavesets reflect a sort of virtual skydome that is centered at the object center and rendered from that point. Reflecting nearby standalone objects is not feasible with wavesets. The best solution to your situation would be to create a static envmap containing only a render of your skydome, and nothing else, and set the envradius to be equal to the physical radius of your skydome. Any details which occur at that distance such as far off mountains could be included as well.

As for the distortion effect, it's a problem with wavesets that cyan either couldn't or didn't resolve. Apparently the reflection always gets distorted at very oblique angles. Somewhat like this:

Show Spoiler

Re: distorted waveset reflection

PostPosted: Sun Oct 11, 2009 7:52 am
by Justintime9
That sounds like a solution to my problem. What would the script be for that? Would I have to pre-render it in blender so that it doesn't render the building too? I actually have 2 skydomes using the same waveset (one for Daytime and one for night) which is swapped with pages.

Re: distorted waveset reflection

PostPosted: Sun Oct 11, 2009 11:09 am
by Paradox
Plasma actually has a way to do this without a separate rendering. Add all of the objects that you want reflected to a visRegion (name it "WaterReflect" or something).
Then you can set that as the EnvMap's visRegion and it will only render objects that are inside that region.

However, I don't see a way to do this with PyPRP, so I'm mentioning it only for the sake of mentioning that it exists as an alternative.