[Community Project] WIP Weather & Water Shader

Nsomnia · January 14, 2016, 3:10am

;452554:

These are some really nice and detailed articles! thanks for the links n00854180t.
The first part is pretty much Nubtron’s BuoyantMesh system so perhaps it can be edited to use the force and damping algorithms from part 2 if only I had kind of article back in the UDK ways when I was developing my buoyant system and struggling to make it stable :p:p

Edit: wait that’s actually the article Nubtron has based his system on haha I don’t know why I thought it was a newer article (I guess because Just Cause 3 was released recently).

I will definitely share the underwater fog, landscape modulation etc. eventually… the problem once again is time I need to find some time to polish things and expose all the necessary parameters (right now it’s a gigantic mess with hardcoded parameters and only works in the demo level so unfortunately it’s really not in a “shareable” state atm at all).

Btw there has been a bit of progress with the underwater masking, it masks it somewhat decently (still far far from perfect but you need to look closely to find masking errors) but the problem is that I had to use the gerstner wave calculations twice(!) in the post process material which ends up hurting performance (it’s at least -10 fps in my machine) so optimization (or a better method altogether actually) is still needed but it’s something :rolleyes: it could be a high-end graphics option I guess.

Anyways! in the meantime, here are some juicy screens just for you guys
http://www.mediafire.com/convkey/c49b/zr2avynw0q4n28vzg.jpg?size_id=5

http://www.mediafire.com/convkey/d988/p5dqrvvzwa7b8a4zg.jpg?size_id=3 http://www.mediafire.com/convkey/1058/jlzy5fgp7nym55ezg.jpg?size_id=3 http://www.mediafire.com/convkey/89a7/ey77bcb3kqzv26azg.jpg?size_id=3

It’s a quick scene I put together using a few marketplace assets (Ultra Dynamic Sky, Pirates Island etc.) just to see how far I could push the visuals. It took some tweaking but I’m happy with the results overall.
Getting just right cubemap captures for the skylight can make a huge huge difference, I’m actually working on a system that blends multiple captures over time (for example you can use 24 cubemaps, one per hour) so we can have seamless day-night cycles without any hitches (since it’s all pre-captured).

I should mention that I have slightly cleaned-up/blurred the reflections in photoshop in some of the screens since the artifacts from the ssr (I’m sure we all have seen those) are a bit too distracting

If someone from Epic is reading … please! do something about the reflections! we desperately need planar reflections… screen space reflections are just not good enough for something like especially not in game when you have control over the camera… in my opinion the lack of decent reflections in UE4 is the biggest rendering when it comes to water.

Is that coastline procedurally generated? If so that would solve my problem of having ports that need a coastline and not having to create 500-5000 sub levels of landscape sculpted coastlines for ports that then go to the origin rebasing level. I’m starting to take interest in getting my submarine simulator back up now that I know so much more about UE4 and finish my Java class end of the month then I’ll have all the time in the world to dedicate to underwater work.