TheGatewayOfRealities

Water 2.0

Added 2017-06-25 12:37:10 +0000 UTC

We really needed a new water shader, because the one we had was ugly, simple, and it wasn't working underwater at all! While its still a long way to the final look, I think it looks quite good already!

It has waves, faked indirect inscattering, better foam near the shore, refraction, specular... In other words, it has tons of weird hacky math to make it look nice! And I think I figured out a golden rule of shaders - take as much formulas you can find on the internet that are done by some math geniuses, put into the shader, profit!

The trickiest part was to make nice underwater visuals. It's still not final, it lacks things like lightshafts, floating particles and bubbles, and it needs a better fog... Cool water requires way too much effects, not just one shader...

This is how the graph looks like. It desperately needs some unraveling and code comments. Yeah... its messy even for my standards.

And this is how the water post process looks like. Its a battlefield of discarded ideas. All disconnected nodes is a history of failed experiments that I just didn't clean up yet, and as you can see, we had lots of "fun" coming up with the math for it xD

The new water will be a part of the new build that is coming soon. Technically, if everything goes as well as it is now, without pitfalls - it's going to be up in a few days. This changelog should be a proof of our hard work :}