Good splash fx in idtech4?

[Arcturus]

Do you have "interaction shader" set to "normal" in the settings?

[SteveL]

Do you have "interaction shader" set to "normal" in the settings?

Yes I did, although I could have sworn I had it set to "enhanced". That fixed it!

[Arcturus]

Hmm why doesn't the _black diffusemap in the second texture "animated_water_refraction" make the water black and opaque?

diffusemap _black

It actually does something. Without it material doesn't react to lights. I added that to splash material.

[nbohr1more]

Could it be that simple?

 

Could all those shader experiments at Doom3world have failed simply because the material didn't

include a black diffuse stage?

 

It simply forces the lighting operation to run as an initial step?

 

Interesting...

[SteveL]

Interesting...

Yes it is. I still have this in mind as an unsolved mystery that I haven't got round to exploring yet. Light interactions are drawn with the depth test set to "equal", i.e. they only draw where the surface exactly fits the depth buffer. That's one reason why light interacting surfaces have to be opaque -- you can only have one surface that matches the scene depth at any given pixel. Clearly something else is going on in this water shader. There are "translucent" light interactions that get drawn after the solid ones, but I haven't seen any code or shaders using that draw pass yet. Perhaps this is one. Light interactions are drawn with an additive blend, so a black surface would come out invisible...