Water lighting effects

[SneaksieDave]

I've given this a few tries over the past while, and consulted with Gildoran about it. I wanted to present it as a neat little suprise, but it's stretching on and I've not had success. Maybe someone here has a concept for how it can be done?

 

I've been looking to duplicate this as close as possible:

http://208.49.149.118/thedarkmod/temp/waterlight.wmv

 

The first problem is, apparently you cannot apply a heathaze shader to a light texture. For me, Doom3 crashes out rather ungracefully. So, the next idea came to just use a bubbly/frothy texture, twice, and translating perpendicular to each other. The hope was that it would cause the wavy bubble parts to appear to undulate. Besides this not looking too great, it also has the following problems: with zeroclamp ON, the textures don't tile and repeat, but instead scroll all at once before starting over. If you can imagine what I'm trying to describe, you see that it is completely useless. With zeroclamp OFF, well, of course that makes the light texture bleed into everything which looks bad and destroys all appearance of a 3D reality, so that's also completely useless.

 

So I'm stuck. Any ideas?

[PinkDot]

Maybe just animated texture? I mean several frames animation - not scrolling or rotating.

I know - someone has to make it...

 

I don't know why lighttexture with zeroclamp off looks bad. Any screenshot..?

[SneaksieDave]

Maybe just animated texture? I mean several frames animation - not scrolling or rotating.

I know - someone has to make it...

I haven't done any animating textures yet... in fact I know nothing of them yet. Would this be a viable solution maybe? It's entirely possible that there is a graceful, really nice way of achieving this that I just don't know (thus my requests for ideas ), and that this isn't just a really crappy limitation in D3 lighting.

 

I don't know why lighttexture with zeroclamp off looks bad. Any screenshot..?

Here was a test using one of the cloudy sky textures as a base. The first has zeroclamp on. The square texture, which is scrolling, doesn't tile; the whole square of it just moves out of the light range and then starts over. The second has zeroclamp off. The light just basically bleeds everywhere, ignoring the light bounds and appearing completely non-3D (this is best seen on your own screen as you control it; just set a light texture with zeroclamp off and you can't miss the difference).

[Dram]

Have you tried a translucent surface but as a diffusemap? That gets lit properly - my waves in my mansion are like that. Or am I misunderstanding?

[Dram]

Just tested. It gets lit properly but does not cast nor accept shadows. Because it is translucent basically....aaarrrghhh

[SneaksieDave]

Could you post a pic or movie of what you tried? Might be useful, I don't know. Artistic capabilities aside, the main problems I ran into are:

 

1. I wanted to distort it with heathaze; can't.

2. as an alternative, I wanted to simply scroll it like a regular texture would, completely tiled; can't - it scrolls in individual instances of the texture, finishes, and then repeats instead of being continously tiled.

[PinkDot]

Sneaksie - I'm not sure if the projected light is a good approach for this. What about just decal patch on a wall on which you want to have caustic effects with animated translucent map with ADD stage only. It would require more work for non-flat walls (f.e. with some beams) but should be possible I think. That's just from the top of my head, never tried this. And I'm not sure what way Dram has made his caustics in his mansion map...

 

That cloudy texture was for testing purposes, I suppose, so with more caustic-like texture it would look even more believable.

 

http://www.rit.edu/~photo/IFS/index-photos...er_caustic2.jpg

 

http://www.sfu.ca/~elfreda/film/caustic.gif

[SneaksieDave]

Sounds pretty complicated. Also, I'm guessing from description that wouldn't allow shadows from player and environment? Not sure how the edges would be handled. Hm. Well, let's cross our fingers that Dram came up with something brilliant (it seems so from the pic!).