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Water rendering

Started by damsku Dec 28, 2006 at 6:22 AM 3 replies 1.5k views

Original Post

Dec 28, 2006 at 6:22 AM

Hi, I'm posting in the direct x forum since i'm using direct x for that and i guess some methods might be more suitable to direct x than to opengl. I'm starting to add some water to my landscape engine, so far everything is going fine, however, i'm not sure how should i do the water. I've googled a bit and checked around different methods. The main goal is to get some nice looking sea/ocean water and so far, it seems the projected grid algorithm would be the most suitable way for doing that. Did anyone try to implement that method and could give me some feedback, are there any critical setbacks? etc.. And i would like your opinion about other algorithms/methods to render sea water which looks freaking good for as cheap as possible? damien

VladR

Dec 29, 2006 at 3:51 AM

Generally, you should divide the issue into 2 phases:
1. Generating ocean mesh - are you implementing FFT or Navier-Stokes equations ?
2. Rendering ocean mesh - do you rely on pixel shaders or should you implement a fallback routine for non-shader HW too ?

If it must look "freaking good", you should also take into account a water color based on sea shore depth/temperature and other parameters. There are papers for that that I read half year ago, but unfortunately can`t remember their names from the top of my head at the moment.

DarthJappie

Dec 29, 2006 at 4:31 AM

NVidia's FX Composer comes with a nice-looking ocean water shader (ocean.fx). Perhaps you could look into that.

damsku

Author

damsku

Dec 31, 2006 at 5:17 AM

I'm surely gonna take a look at the NVidia example. Thank you :)

damsku

Author

damsku

Dec 31, 2006 at 5:28 AM

VladR: I haven't decided yet which equation i'll go for. To be honnest, at this stage, i don't really know what's the difference between them :)
Non-shader HW would be interesting to support, but for the version i'm doing and the time i have, it's really not an issue if i drop it :)
I expect to do a sea water which would have reflection and refraction, depth, (water caustics are not a requirement) and foam..

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