How to make a nice looking water surface?

[motorsep]

So I spent two evenings trying to make good water surface using whatever capacity Doom 3 has and I found it impossible

 

How did you make it in TDM ? Did you have custom ARB shaders ?

 

Here is what I came up with (realtime reflection is a custom shader and has artifacts on object partially submerged into water, so unless we fix that, I won't use it):

 

 

Basically it's just a brush with 5 sides of nodraw and surface having my water material:

textures/water/water_surface1
{
	translucent
	twoSided
	noShadows
	noSelfShadow
	nonsolid		
	qer_editorimage textures/water/water_surface1_strip16_editor.tga
	{
		vertexProgram		heatHaze.glsl		
		vertexParm		0	time * .1, time * 0.08		
		vertexParm		1	2
		fragmentProgram		heatHaze.glsl		
		fragmentMap		0	_currentRender
		fragmentMap		1	normalMap textures/water/water_surface1_local.tga
	}	
	{
		blend blend
		map textures/water/water_surface1_d.tga		
		alpha 0.15
		scroll sinTable[time * .02] * .01, time * 0.02		
		shear sinTable[time * .02] * .02, cosTable[time * .02] * .02
		rotate sinTable[time * .01] * .01
	}
	{
		blend bumpmap
		map textures/water/water_surface1_local.tga		
		scroll sinTable[time * .02] * .01, time * 0.02		
		shear sinTable[time * .02] * .02, cosTable[time * .02] * .02
		rotate sinTable[time * .01] * .01
	}
	{
		blend specularmap
		map textures/water/water_surface1_s.tga	
		scroll sinTable[time * .02] * .01, time * 0.02		
		shear sinTable[time * .02] * .02, cosTable[time * .02] * .02
		rotate sinTable[time * .01] * .01
	}	
	
}

If I add cubemap reflection, it looks like crap, since it just sits there, doesn't deform or anything like that, so my water looks like ice (I tested it in stock Doom 3 and it's the same story):

 

 

I recall TDM having decent water, and I wonder how that was achieved. Thanks!

Edited March 19, 2015 by motorsep

[Arcturus]

Have you seen this thread? Here's the demo map.

[motorsep]

I did now, thanks I need to look into the map file. Sounds like you have several surfaces sandwiched to achieve final look, and I only have one.

 

Hmm.. How come you use _black as diffuse, and yet water is transparent?

[Arcturus]

Yeah, I think I just copied it from some other material. It probably does nothing.

[motorsep]

Yeah, I probably just copied it from somewhere else. I don't know if it does anything at all.

 

Does water ever get "bumpy" in your example? I tried using normal map to simulate waviness/bumpiness, but it seems like it's a no-go (maybe because transparent surfaces don't get interactions).

[Arcturus]

In the video you can see that it has specularmap affected by normalmap so specular reflection looks bumpy. Also image is warped by the same normalmap. And that's only one material. The other two are for the mirror reflection and a colour.

[motorsep]

I think I got it working (in Phaeton):

Had to do it in 3 layers (overdraw is intense I bet) - bottom layer is reflection with Fresnel, middle layer is color/normal/spec/gloss and the upper layer is refraction.

Thanks for the input Arcturus.