This looks really swell! (haha)
Definitely interested in picking this up.
Having it automatically interact with shores using depth would definitely be preferable, our map is too big to do it by hand.
How does it handle directions of waves? For example if I use it with a big island in the middle, would waves crash into the island on all sides or would they go through the island and look strange on some sides of it?
Would love to see a way of using this for rivers as well.
Also would like to request a way of optimizing it when it’s further away as much as possible (as mentioned by CyberDev). Would be great to have that kind of quality when close but having it be a lot simpler when far away (otherwise I don’t think it would work for our map).
Very nice, perhaps two questions. How optimized is this shader comparing to regular simple water shader? Or with other words what ms/FPS hit does it have? Additionally do you plan to add white wave capping lines on steep parts of waves? Would be nice additional to look improvement.
EDIT: Sory, was sloppy not reading properly trough thread. Now that i read it all my questions are answered. Looks very impressive, the only thing that would be nice to see is white capping on waves or perhaps subsurface scattering support.
From my experiments with objects of different size I found that it is usually necessary to tweak the damping a bit (available as a parameter in the Buoyancy component). Also it is important to have enough test points along the length of the object, otherwise you will have waves that don’t affect the floating object when they are in the gap between two test points. It’s also important to make sure that the floating object has the correct mass in the UE4 physics system, otherweise the object will move too fast and it will not look correct.
The ocean waves move way too fast. I would cut the speed down to 0.75-0.5, maybe get some simple panning normals for the smaller waves. The detail chops are also way to sharp. Water is not quite that textured. I assume you’re using Gerstner waves for the larger forms and tiling normals for the choppy detail.
Yeah, unfortunately if you’re using procedural methods to generate waves, if you only use it to manipulate vertices, you wind up with a very flat-solid-shaded, displaced silhouette. You NEED to use the Gerstner waves in the normals calculation. There was a nice page that described different normal map blending modes, but honestly UE4’s BlendAngleCorrected normals is the best method, and all other methods, while viable, will only save you a few instructions at the most. UDK’s method was to mask RG on both normals, add them together, then append the blue channel from the base normal. This saves about 5 instructions from the BlendAngleCorrected function. The Gerstner waves will probably add about a few hundred!
A few people have said yes to this reply, and I would agree, but I’d also go a step further. I think automatic generation is required to achieve a more realistic shoreline (and saves countless hours of work along all the shorelines we’d have in our game), but I’d also like a means of manually painting after the auto-generation has been completed. This gives us the flexibility for artistic license.
I’m not sure if you’ve seen this before, obviously it’s using the Assassin’s Creed III engine and not UE but a good breakdown of what makes their water look realistic:
Ok, let me know when its available, what would the price be? Will there be splash effects or possible to make boat wakes? I also see the water texture is kind of “static”, will that be adjustable?
Of course, you can adjust or extend the shader in every way you like. I’m thinking of ways how to make splash effects possible, but it’s not included at the moment.
Shore interaction will not be in the initial release, it would delay things further. I have received quite a lot of requests of people who want to buy the shader as it is as soon as possible, so I don’t want to add more delay.
But I cannot find it in the marketplace, is it out? Or when is the plan for release?
](