How would I make a waterfall?

[L B]

I'm just curious, I need to make one, I wonder what's the most efficient way to do one.

[f13rce]

I saw other guys doing it by making a simple smooth waterfall model non animated

which has an animated texture surrounded by some particles

That looked pretty good.

[Michael Betke]

unreal2 used a model with animated texture and some particles.

 

crysis uses an only particle approach. they place some particles on the cliff models and get a decent effect with them. unreal 2 looked decent too. just go and try.

[L B]

Does LE support animated textures?

[macklebee]

yes, thats what the water in LE is currently. Look at the how the framewerk renderer does this for water...

 

well, kinda... it takes multiple textures and changes the material texture over time

[f13rce]

Does LE support animated textures?

 

Not sure, so far I know only .GIF can be animated, and I noticed only .DDS can be imported..

So I guess you have to do the particle approach.. Not sure to be honest.

[Canardia]

I just finished Far Cry 2 today, and in the last mission I saw a waterfall. I analyzed it with the sniper scope of my Dragunov rifle, and it looked basically that it was made out of several emitters. There was one emitter at the start which rotated the sprites to make it look like a swirl. Then there was the actual waterfall emitter, which moved sprites downwards at a higher speed, and at the ending there was a elliptic emitter where the water bounced back from the river once. LE has only one-directional emitters, so you would need to code the elliptic emitter yourself.

 

I haven't analyzed yet how the waterfalls in Crysis are done, but I think they use a much better approach, as everything in Far Cry 2 was like trying to copy features of Crysis, but failing in basically everything. I was wondering why Far Cry 2 looks so bad, although it had those Crysis style bright and dark areas, but then I noticed it's all fake. Far Cry 2 has no real lights at all, it's all somekind of hardcoded in-place effects. You could see some objects lighted nicely, but everything around them was dark, so there was no real directional light, but only some "light" which was applied on hardcoded objects. Heck, even a plain cube without texture in LE looks better than Far Cry 2

[DaDonik]

Does LE support animated textures?

 

Not as far as i know. Look at the water that comes with LE, there are

about 30 dds textures that are used as an animation.

[Canardia]

An animated texture is just a file format how multiple textures are stored. They can be stored in a single file (animated gif), or in multiple files (like the multiple DDS files in LE). When the file is loaded, it's split into seperate images anyway, so it doesn't really matter at all how it was stored on disk (or in a SQLite database, or whatever media).

[L B]

I tried making one with 3 emitters. The result isn't so good, but I don't know which parameters to mess with. I'm uploading a video to YouTube.

[L B]

Oh nice:

[Canardia]

2D sprite emitters have a lot of problems anyway, I must really implement 3D mesh emitters with physics into GameLib.

[L B]

Here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bPsqDm9OGO0&feature=youtube_gdata

[Canardia]

Basically not bad, but it can be improved with very little effort: place the swirl emitter at the beginning (like in Far Cry 2) to avoid those popping up of new sprites at the top, and make the falling emitters longer sprites, not so round (or maybe it can be done with the existing sprite, if you make the falling stream not so broad).

[Pixel Perfect]

This was done with animated textures in LE2, its a little wobbly as it was just a test of the technique using some hand held video taken on my camera to produce a seamless series of frames to project onto a plane:

 

http://www.youtube.c...h?v=zDOGHtVlpbg

 

It could easily be combined with emitters to add spray and mist. Projecting it onto a slightly convex surface would probably give better results too.

[Naughty Alien]

..what i would do is, place few waterfall meshes (shape of your waterfall), then create few copies(maybe change some vertexes to get different flow path) and then apply one, well done tileable texture of water applied on to each waterfall mesh.. each created waterfall mesh has applied different texture with different look/transparency (one is more water dusty, one is more foamy and one is entirely watery)..then simply move given textures with different speed along U or V and you will have excellent waterfall..apply some refraction shader on to waterfall mesh with watery texture and you will get very very good results..additionally, put some particle to create water dust around touchdown area or any other collision place and you are set with very good looking waterfall...

[Josh]

I would use particles with a refractive material.