A moving-texture water demo

[Lontahv]

Well... here's what I could make--I could make better but, anim stuff is kind of hard, and when you have to deal transparent-stuff, it gets more complex, but... Here's what I have so far:

http://lontahv.googlepages.com/water_test.zip


~Lontahv

[Aloys]

As I already told you: that's great.
Now you know what you have left to do.. Write a tutorial!
Thank you in advance.

[Lontahv]

Ok, a tutorial is on the way but... be for-warned; don't expect anything too good, I am not tut-master like Nadnerb. I'll do my best--but maybe I should wait... I did need to mod the plugin to get the alpha to be good looking. That's another thing I'm going to try to sort out before I make the tutorial, you folks have waited for water like this, you can wait a few more days. Also, the water isn't done yet. I need to add some envs to it--then it will truly be envied.


~Lontahv

[Aloys]

Yes, I think we can wait. It's not like we haven't a dozen features we still don't use properly in our Ages..

[Aloys]

Ah, I just noticed Nadnerb had indeed already written a quick tutorial... last week? Now tutorials are published before features are in place?

[Lontahv]

Here we go.

http://guildofwriters.com/wiki/Making_some_simple_Animated_Water

I haven't written in how do do ripples yet but... they're much the same only that they move faster and you'll need that plug-in of mine because there are 2 layers of alpha, and you'll need to know the object-parenting trick.


~Lontahv

[Grogyan]

Quick question about your modified PyPrp, does it include the "fix" for cameras?

Cause now that we can have moving water textures, I can add some neat effects that I would like for my shell (the same shell as I did in RAD)

[Lontahv]

Well, it's just the same but for one thing: the Zbias issue-causing code is commented out, translation: The only thing that's different is some alpha texture stuff which is important for water.


~Lontahv

[Robert The Rebuilder]

Lontahv: The reason for that code is so that alpha transparencies are properly sorted. So, we still need to make this code available.

What happens when the spans sort code is left in? What artifacts do you see?

And if you change kCrit/PropSortSpans to kCrit/PropSortFaces, does that solve your problem? I'm reluctant to make this the default because of the performance hit, but perhaps (as your code comments suggest) we could somehow make this an option.

[Paradox]

I have a whole bunch of intersecting planes that act as grass in my Shell. With the sorting code, these Z-fight painfully. Without the sorting code, they don't Z-fight, but there is a noticeable sorting error.

Something needs to be done, because currently the sorting code is making things look worse