water reflection question

Ripples are done in the pixel shader via a normal map.

Here you can find all what you need:
http://www.riemers.net/eng/Tutorials/XNA/Csharp/series4.php

Thanks for reply. That's a great site you suggested. Actually I already implemented ripples via normal mapping(forgot to mention that).

It looks nice, but what I want to do now is add some "real" waves by displacing geometry. I heard for some methods for achieving like FFT and sum of sines but I would need a hint on which one is the best for games.

Also, how should I implement reflection in that case(planar one obviously wouldn't work on non flat surface)?

[Edited by - butthead_82 on February 23, 2009 11:51:31 AM]

FFT is used in some commercial titles. (Crysis and Age of conan I think)

If you get FFT ready the reflection is no problem anymore. You need to calculate the normal in the vertex shader and with this you can get the reflection. For the reflection render target I used the same as in planar. I had no need for cubic reflection but my waves weren't that high. Even when they are high you can "cheat" a little bit with a normal map to displace it further or just ignore everything that is reflected behind you and just use the sky.

Another method would be via some layers of perlin noise. The results are very nice even with just 2 perlin noises but it was a little slow in my implementation.

What's your opinion about that texture displacement from GPU Gems 2?
http://http.developer.nvidia.com/GPUGems2/gpugems2_chapter18.html

I took a look on that, it seems to provide fine results with relatively small computational price.

But I don't quite understand radial coordinate LOD system. And even more frustrating is that I cannot find it explained anywhere.

Know about some sources on this?