Hey everyone,
I’m using cesium tiles and while I’m aware they have custom water mask enabled option to get water where tile present “water” ,but it’s not working for all places sadly and for the place I’m working on it does not seem to work.
Anyone knows a good material from epic or good tutorial that works with cesuim tiles ?
I tried integrating depth fade in the HLOD material water of EPIC but it’s too complicate for my level , the parent material has too many node and I tried modifying all params in the instance, it didn’t change anything which is quite strange (aside from water speed).
Does anyone know if that material has depth fade for water shorelines working on a plane ?
My goal is to reduce the brutal transition between water and the google tiles.
Is it part of a whole?
Same mesh - just material stuff?
If so, then you need to delve deep into the material, find where the transition is driven from, and alter the offset values that drive it.
If not on the same object, then the issue is the water or waterbody setup and its material.
The map undrdneath it wont change at all.
The transition between transparency and opacity should be driven by DistanceToNearestSurface.
For that to work correctly you obviously need computed heightfileds and all the bells and whiatles that go with it.
If you are dealing with a static section, just save yourself time and money.
Dump the water material. Make your own using single layer water.
Take a reading of the depth by creating a postprocess that paints from 1 to 0 the depth of your waterline and below.
Setup and screencapture2d said postprocess screenshot.
Used the produced RT (probably after saving unless you need realtime) within the water material to expressly drive the transparency with whatever other additional options (to higheten/lessen) you see fit.
Pick back in the gerstner stuff for the water system you use (i would suggest you just go fully custom the engine stuff is trash, but you can pipe the engine stuff back in).
And that’s that.
You get very nice, if not perfect transitions in a way that works.
As a bonus, you can acrually use the mask to generate shore waves by sweeping accross the produced image via time and sine. Its not going to be perfect. It probably wont have/support physics unless you go out of your way to code it which reading and doing math off a pixel value is kind of expensive but it’ll get you pretty darn far…
Hey thank you for the detailed answer.
I followed Ben Cloward water shade episodes, and the shader is good applied to a plane but for a big world with camera turned around 360 , the fresnel and the depth fade are all gone wrong. I believe it’s also because he said in the tutorial it won’t work well if the plane is bit deformed in height so you know I just gave up,Going to leave this as it.
I’m not very advanced in material and quite honeslty water is super hard to get right with cesium tiles. This is why they have an option to get the material if it detects the tile has water on it but they also said it doesn’t detect all place in earth “water” .
So just tried for 4 hours or so with Ben’s material to adapt and it’s not great from certain angles so I will just let this one like with the harsh transition.
Ben Cloward has the right tutorial that would get you to understand the part about sweeping time for waves as the one for raindrops.
Same theory, different image you run against. Different math to achieve it too, but same base theory.
Re the fresnel etc, maybe just remove it.
There really isnt any need for super special stuff on most water.
In fact, you’d be normally hard-pressed to even see it as seethrough in a natural setting in most places where people live.
In other words: I have only ever seen Hawaiian like shores in Hawaii… attempting to make a convincing material for hawaii and then applying it to Detroit makes littel to no sense…
Water in games isn’t a “one size fits all” ordeal even if at the molecular level all H is 2 O…
Single Layer Water usf builds some common things in for you, making entry level coding of the material much more of a breeze.
Without it, you need to worry about sort priority of waves and a bunch more.
If you can find it, you can likely lift the old materials off the community ocean project.
And even if you dont like it, you can learn from their materials which are made from scratch through practical use of the engine at that version and what it was capable of (not much, unreal has never done transparency and reflections right).
thank you yeah you’re right for the water aspect all over places
it’s okay it’s not for game but for archviz, I talked with cesium creators too and sadly even after enabling their water mask which makes water material for you, the transition problem is still there, even in their project sample.
For cesium the reason is that they are using squares tiles so obviously, the mask will have jagged edges like AA problem LOL, so at some point the transition will be these jagged edges and they are too big so I kept my old water from Epic and let the line be harsh as in that image.
Ben Cloward material is really amazing and complete and I’m glad i find it, it’s good for close up. I will learn more about matrials of water after this project I hope. I had a deadline so I needed to finish it, it was my first big world project , learned already a lot.
