More Realisitc Water

[andylegate]

With the ability to animate our textures now, I've been working on learning how to use these to help things like water look a bit more realistic in my Ages.

Making the texture move about, and also using the same method to make Contact Ripples (where the water touches solid objects) has helped a lot.

However something is still missing.

Taking a stroll to Eder Kemo and Gira, I've been studing their water there. Waterfalls? No problem! Using the method we have, I've made what looks like a spring coming from rocks with a waterfall into my pond in Camp Bravo Day Time, and it looks darn good and believable. Add sound and contact ripples and it will be perfect.

Now, however, the face of the pond....and the pool too. I've got them slowly moving....but this isn't a river or creek, or channeled water. It's a pond like you have in Kemo and Gira.

one thing is the Enviormental Map needs to be done. To make it look like the water is reflecting the sky, etc. I know this, and by god I swear I'm going to take the time out to learn to do this!

But it's more than that. It's the actual ripples in the water. I don't mean the contact ripples around the edges. But the ripples in the middle of the water, what seems to be going up and down.

I do know that if you go and take a look at the water in Ahnonay, boy do you have a lot going on there. And I actually have achieved a good portion of this with my swimming pool, by having several textures applied to my water, and moving them in different directions.

But that's still not the same thing as in Kemo or Gira.
Looking at these Ages in Blender, I don't see much in the way of what textures were applied. Let me concentrate on the fish pool in Kemo at the end of that Age.
There is one mesh there that is the water surface. The texture that they used is blue/green with static looking ripples.
It also has a 2nd texture applied, a blend ramp.
Of course I imported this Age back using the old 0.5 plugin. And I'm not sure if the new plugin, if it could be forced to import Ages again ( ) would show. Would it show offsets for the animation? Is the texture animated? If so, how? Why does the word "Bumpmap" keep going through my head?

Okay, gotta go help do something.

[greendragoon]

So I decided to go into some of the ages and solve the mystery. Wow, just about every body of water Cyan made is a little bit different. Please not that so far I've only been using flymode to look at the water from different angles. I haven't tried to import any of the ages yet. Here are my findings:

Eder Kemo:

This is incredible. This is probably the most complex water in Uru. The water doesn't have a color map that I can see, just a reflection map. Any color you see is either from that or the coloring of the bottom of the pond. Andy I think you were right that there is an animated bump map. (By animated, I mean import a movie clip, not set keyframes on the uv transforms.) It was probably created in a compositor like After Effects or Shake. But it doesn't stop there. When the rain comes, the bump map fades to a more violent ripple pattern, while the reflection map fades to a darker version. And it's all controlled through code!

Eder Gira:

This one is very similar to Kemo, except no passing storms and Gira adds contact ripples around the edges. When the avatar jumps in, the ripples that appear are just static. They are spawned at regular intervals, expand and fade out. Keep repeating this and you have the trail. I wonder if this is something we could do.

D'ni:

When I first looked at the D'ni lake I thought I was just a repeat of Gira and Kemo. But as I got closer, I realized that it was different. Yes it produced the same effect, but the got to it by a different means. If you get close, You'll notice that the geometry has a funny zig-zag look to it. I think this combined with a ripple distortion filter thrown directly on to the reflection map is how they achieve this.

Teledahn:

There are three bodies of water of note here. 1) Inside the Mushroom. The bottom water that you later drain. This One uses the method closest to what we have. Just a couple of alpha color layers moving in different directions. Contact ripples are used here too. 2) The stagnant water in the swamp. With this one, the water is defined by the gunk floating in it. The reflections you see are semi-transparent, darker versions of the reflected geometry, inverted upside down. The inverted sky is also given an orange tint. 3) Lastly, the open ocean. This one seems to fall back on the bump mapping for it's ripples, but still makes use of the inverted geometry method for more specific reflections. The reflection map is very low res on this one.

Garresson:

Uses a plain and simple version of the bump map effect.

Ahnonnay:

There are two separate geometry layers here. 1) The Ripple Water. This one takes a departure an puts a ripple distortion on the color map. All the reflections are inverted geometry. 2) The Current. This one uses at least 2 possibly 3 texture layers moving in different directions. I would bet that the entire geometry is spinning to give it the swirly effect.

So there you go, some of these effects we can duplicate, others we can't. I'm going to go soak my fingers in hot water.

[Jojon]

I expect that the waves are produced by a procedural bump handler, rather than animated textures included with uru explorer.

[greendragoon]

I suppose it could be, but wouldn't that be heavier on the renderer? To be honest, I know how it works in the world of pre-rendered, I'm still learning how it's different in the world of real-time.

[Jojon]

3D fractal noise is pretty low-overhead and you can animate simply by translating it in relation to the object -- move the noise origin slowly up or down (and a bit laterally too, if you want) -- your texture/bumpmap takes its values from where the object surface intersects the fractal space. For additional ripples (say, wind ripples over current-induced waves), simply modulate with a second, denser noise volume.

I have no idea whether Plasma does anything like this, of course, but... :7


Does Plasma do any bumpmapping at all, by the way, other than specifically on these water volumes? I can't recall ever seeing any.

[andylegate]

Last I heard from the Tool Team, there is no support for Bumpmaps. Now I don't know if they mean the plugin doesn't support it right now, or if they mean Plasma doesn't support it.

[Jojon]

Well, Plasma IS rather old now, after all, so probably it doesn't. We may be able to pull off a more-or-less similar effect if we can animate reflection boxes though, turning the box (with a simple gradient in it) along with the lights. There may perhaps be something like that going on in the Gahreesen link-in well, come to think of it...

[greendragoon]

I'm not surprised, true bump mapping has only recently made it's way into video games, and is usually an extra option for higher end systems. I think Jojon is right in that the this is some procedural thing that distorts the reflection map based on a luminosity map of some kind. Weather this is a feature of Plasma or a custom written thing by Cyan specifically for these ages, I don't know.

There are probably ways we can fake it, but everything I can think of is very case specific. The best method may vary wildly based on where the water is, what it's interacting with and what is being done to it.

[Jojon]

...true bump mapping...

Ah, <nostalgia mode> now you made me remember my disappointment, back in the day, when I came to realise that bumpmapping doesn't make any bumps at all, but just shades one's still flat surface as if it did have bumps. Apparently what I wanted, but couldn't have at the time, was called displacement maps. How I swore over my beautifully cliched reflective sphere, that floated in equally cliched wavy water, but with a sharp not-in-the-least-undulating intersection line between them - and I'm still naive enough to expect too much from the software. :7

[greendragoon]

Ah but do you remember how it took a minute for the renderer to spit out just one frame. I suppose if we really wanted to, we could always port Uru over to the Playstation 3. I bet you that it has bump map support.

Then you'd have the equivelant of realtime Riven.