I spent the last day or so working on a waterfall effect for Dragonfly Odyssey. It uses shader-side animation of some shader-side billboarded quads. I've reached the end of my self-imposed tweaking deadline and this is what I have so far:
http://youtu.be/s0rAjdx2PXIDescription from the video page:
It’s not ‘perfect’ but I’ve reached my “tweaking deadline”. Things like this, I have to give myself a deadline for endless tweaking otherwise it takes too much time. It’s obviously a waterfall now and I can swing back and tweak it some more when there is more of a game. The waterfall is one of the critical story elements and helps tie together some of the other water-related stuff I’m working on.
This particle effect is done as a static mesh using a shader-side particle effect and billboard rotated quads (in shader). It’s the same mesh layered a few times with different textures… though it could have just as easily been different meshes, too.
Three layers at the moment that don’t always sort like they should and you see them pop in front. Good enough for now.
This is using ideas that I designed for Mythruna, so when it’s all properly working then this will definitely be a part of Mythruna’s water system.
Simsilica, LLC Web site:
http://simsilica.com Follow at:
http://twitter.com/simsilica WIP site:
http://dragonfly-odyssey.com tl;dr: it’s not perfect but it’s good enough for now.
As said, this is definitely the kind of waterfalls I eventually want in Mythruna and is one of the major points of having a more complicated water system there. It's nice to know that once 'flow' is working in Mythruna that I'll be able to drop in some waterfalls right away.
The path of the falls itself is generated by a simple physics function and so can technically bounce and interact with the terrain if I want it to. In Mythruna's case, this will include user-placed objects and so on. No point in being able to blueprint a roof/umbrella if it won't deflect the water.
