Realistic texture-based Water/Waterfalls?

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Tormentor667
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Realistic texture-based Water/Waterfalls?

Post by Tormentor667 »

I am currently trying to improve various aspects of basic things in Blade of Agony, including the water effects in general. What is currently annoying me the most is the way the water looks and behaves. WARP and WARP2 are overused and most of the available stock textures simply do not convince me. So the question now is: Did someone come up with a good shader and texture combination for water and waterfalls? Maybe even with the usage of materials to make the water convincing enough?
Last edited by Tormentor667 on Sun Jan 20, 2019 8:46 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Cherno
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Re: Realistic Water/Waterfalls?

Post by Cherno »

Maybe don't use textures at all but rather have an actor at the top that spawns a continuous flow of water splash sprite actors. Probably not feasable for large waterfalls, though.
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Re: Realistic texture-based Water/Waterfalls?

Post by Tormentor667 »

Maybe I wasn't clear enough. For waterfalls we have aready "sfx spawners", but what I would like to have is a more realistic and natural looking waterfall effect textrue and water effect texture. Currently it looks like this in BoA:

Simple texture, WARP2 effect, that's it. I am not pleased. What I would like to have is something more like this one:

https://youtu.be/eNVOtvqiSOo?t=225

It is clear to me that these kind of water effects aren't realizable in GZDoom, but how close can you get?
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Re: Realistic texture-based Water/Waterfalls?

Post by Kappes Buur »

The waterfalls in Rex's Paranoid are pretty good
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Re: Realistic texture-based Water/Waterfalls?

Post by Darkcrafter »

I would create a custom animated texture based on googled waterfall GIFs
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Re: Realistic texture-based Water/Waterfalls?

Post by Tormentor667 »

Not convincing to be honest :(
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Re: Realistic texture-based Water/Waterfalls?

Post by dpJudas »

I'm afraid all better water effects require access to the depth buffer and possibly a copy of the color buffer as well. A material shader on the water surface then uses those two to create reflection and muddy waters.
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Re: Realistic texture-based Water/Waterfalls?

Post by Tormentor667 »

So what is restricting this?
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Re: Realistic texture-based Water/Waterfalls?

Post by Graf Zahl »

Maybe the simple fact that for rendering realistic water you need a bit of info about the environment?
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Re: Realistic texture-based Water/Waterfalls?

Post by dpJudas »

Tormentor667 wrote:So what is restricting this?
Less and less, luckily. Initially it was a messy abstraction caused by ZDoom and GZDoom not being the same repository. Luckily Graf has cleaned this up a lot the last few years. The vulkan work will improve this even further as it will ensure the abstraction doesn't directly rely on OpenGL calls like it did far more in the bad old days.

Main thing restricting it right now, aside for someone committing to the work, is that the engine needs to know when a rendering includes a water plane so it can make a copy of the scene buffer. This needs to be done at exactly the same place as the SSAO pass already copies the depth buffer. And like with SSAO there are portal trade offs where such kind of water should be avoided as much as possible near those. A good implementation would therefore also require possible fall back to a simple classic water effect for people on less powerful GPU's.
Graf Zahl wrote:Maybe the simple fact that for rendering realistic water you need a bit of info about the environment?
Naturally, most of the super fancy effects won't be possible to do as they won't be compatible at all. 2000-2005 age water effects should generally be possible and IMHO often look better artistically than the newer stuff anyway.
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Re: Realistic texture-based Water/Waterfalls?

Post by Graf Zahl »

dpJudas wrote: Naturally, most of the super fancy effects won't be possible to do as they won't be compatible at all. 2000-2005 age water effects should generally be possible and IMHO often look better artistically than the newer stuff anyway.

I find that games from that era look better in general without all those hyper-realistic effects of more recent titles.
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Re: Realistic texture-based Water/Waterfalls?

Post by dpJudas »

I don't want hyper realistic effects. The real world is actually pretty boring in a computer game - if that's the goal I think people should go outside and look at real water. ;)

What I want is the ability to add a little bit of screen space reflection, a bit of depth-based mud effects. In both cases the environmental part comes from textures provided by the mod - if you want it muddy, use a muddy texture, is it toxic then some greenish texture and so on. Essentially just spice it up a little bit beyond the translucent single texture water plane.
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Re: Realistic texture-based Water/Waterfalls?

Post by Darkcrafter »

Hey what's about reflection maps like used in games of early 00's? BF2 for example have them! But I think it's not that important to have such things for waterfalls. For a waterfall a 3d model or sprite of splashes is needed, you can see how it works in the same good old BF2. Spread those sprites around the wall in the air, give them some opacity and you're there?

I tried using the same texture I posted above on an intentionally made MD3 model of wall and it looked super lousy even though big effort was made to make a model. So for realistic waterfall using just a flat texture isn't sufficient.
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Re: Realistic texture-based Water/Waterfalls?

Post by Rachael »

What would probably really make an effect like this sing is if the sector is marked as a reflective surface, and then a custom material shader is given direct access to the resulting portal render and can output whatever it wants in its place.

Would such a thing be possible? This would even allow for ripple effects.

What would *REALLY* make it stand out is if it would be possible to render two portals onto the same texture and give said shader access to both. Then you can refract things beneath the surface in the output, too.
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Re: Realistic texture-based Water/Waterfalls?

Post by Tormentor667 »

Rachael wrote:What would probably really make an effect like this sing is if the sector is marked as a reflective surface, and then a custom material shader is given direct access to the resulting portal render and can output whatever it wants in its place.
[..]
What would *REALLY* make it stand out is if it would be possible to render two portals onto the same texture and give said shader access to both. Then you can refract things beneath the surface in the output, too.

That would be awesome :)
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