Distance Field Flow Map

[Roel]

@RyanB;332238

By combining both techniques you will get the best of both worlds. Meaning the flow maps bend the flow direction and the normal determines the ‘exit wake’. It should naturally slow down the water at the back side of the rocks.

Also if you look at the kite demo river material, you will see it does something similar using the heightmap and normals of the river bank texture so that on a very small scale the water appears to bend around the little pebbles at the shore line. By combining all three layers (DF generated normals with local tiny scene normals and flowmaps) it should be possible to get something really nice. In the scene where the boy falls in the water there is a little hand-crafted flowmap that was made by manually blurring a screen capture of the rock shapes and making a photoshop normal. But you can probably use it for flowmap control ideas.

Thanks for the feedback Ryan! I will see if I can make some time to make it all look a little better. I already got the flow slightly better behind the rocks but not it gets extremely deformed in tight spots. Will update as soon as I’m happy with a new result.

Could someone explain why using distance to the nearest surface takes up 4 texture samples? Is this always the case with volume textures?