Guild of Writers

D'Lanor, let me ask you a question then: I'm a firm believer in K.I.S.S., it's a very old Military acronym.

However, each example of Cyan's water that I've looked at so far, the mesh's are not that simple. And when I tried that with Zephyr, the water was very reflective, but just didn't look right. The more complex I made the mesh for the ocean, the more like an ocean it started to look like..

Are you saying KISS for those that have older cards? Or what?

EDIT: also...is there a way to control how reflective the dynenv map is?

Indeed... Ahonay's waveset mesh is really quite dense.

You should be able to control the reflectivity using the depthrange params.. ie waveset.depthrange.start: 0, end: <something large> thus forcing it to be deeper to achieve the same 'shinyness'.

Got it Nadnerb, thanks! I'll give that a whirl.

yah, Ahnonay is quite dense, however you'll notice that both it and like Er'cana swirl pools, they are uniform pretty much. My problem is constructing a new mesh with my shoreline that is not quite so dense, but is also uniform as you get away from the shore. What happens is, The water ripples and reflects, look great (my wife 'bout fell through the floor she was so impressed with what it does, so good job, you impressed the heck outta her), I end up with these "wedges" that reflect different than the faces on either side.....mmmm.....kinda looks like the old Japanese "Rising Sun" flag, different directions of reflection, every other face....this is just the meshes far from shore now. Close up, it doesn't do that, but close up, I have more quad like shapes.

Looks to me, like for Ahnonay, a Sphere mesh, that was cut in half, and then flattened. I'm thinking of giving this a try, and just manipulate the vertex to meet my shore line, just like we see in Cyan's Ages, then see how that turns out.

Well, Ahnonay works on my old graphics card. So I guess you could be right. Maybe flat instead of simple is the key.

What I need to do is look at Teledahn. We got ocean there. But everytime I go to import it, I get an error. Any chance on getting that "ignore" button??

In the tut I read about using for instance the bottom of a pool. If flat is "better" why not model the water plane first with all the complexity needed, push that back to pool depth and use it as a base to work from. You have to set the center to the correct height above the plane off course. As far as I understand the ripples will be created at the correct height (center) and the end result is easier to influence. It sounds crazy to force the modelled bottom of a pool to the complexity or simplicity you want.

andylegate wrote:What I need to do is look at Teledahn. We got ocean there. But everytime I go to import it, I get an error. Any chance on getting that "ignore" button??

Import is no longer a supported feature at this time. The general population of Age Builders is more interested in exporting, and we'd rather focus our attention on adding new features as opposed to making sure that old features import properly.

To the best of my knowledge there it is not different if there are fewer or less faces. If you set GeoState:chop: 0.0 everything will be the same as a super-subdivided plane. Don't think that it needs to model each wave. It uses bump-maps.

~Lontahv

Import is no longer a supported feature at this time. The general population of Age Builders is more interested in exporting, and we'd rather focus our attention on adding new features as opposed to making sure that old features import properly.

That's too bad. I think that there is a lot that people can still learn from how Cyan made things. Ah well, your guy's choice.

I'll just roll back to 0.5 to import something, and then go back to the latest to work and export then, only takes a few minutes to do.

Got a question about the "Shore" part of the waveset. Nadnerb says in the tutorial:

Then we extend the uv map so it shows about one length per edge polygon using this dummy texture.

Not quite sure I understand what this is saying. Do we unwrap the UV Map? And then adjust the UV mapping so it's laid out in a straight line? Sort of like how the ripples are done with animated textures? Or are you saying something else?