In this tutorial, we will create our own custom ocean material and apply it to a level. As the ocean is commonly used in games as an interactive game play element, we will also cover the underwater fog settings to make underwater game play enjoyable for our player.
The Live_Create_Small level should be open in the Editor. Your Time Of Day dialog should be open in the editor and set to a time of 0630. You should also set it to a very high specification to observe the advanced tessellation features.
Let's create a new photo realistic ocean for the level:
- First, to see the currently applied ocean material, open the Environment tab in the RollupBar.
- Under the Ocean parameter you will see four parameters.
- First, let's apply our own material.
- Click on the browse button in the Ocean material parameter. This will open the currently applied material.
- Create a new material and name it
my_ocean.mtland save it under your root directory/materials/ocean/. - Next, click apply in the Ocean material parameter in the RollupBar. You will notice that there is no water yet. This is because the Ocean requires a specialized shader to render.
- To set the shader you must edit your newly created material
my_ocean.mtl, set the shader parameter in this material to water.
Now that we have some basic water, we should apply a bump map to create the small ripples and waves on the water's surface. This will allow some refraction to occur, enhancing the overall effect.
- For now use the texture located in
textures/defaults/oceanwaves_ddn.dds. - To finalize the material ensure that the Sunshine tickbox is active in the Shader Generation Parameters.
- Now, let's adjust the Ocean settings available to us in the Time of Day dialog.
- Then locate the advanced parameters. Adjust the Ocean Fog Color to a pleasant blue for this particular scene 107, 217, 241 RGB.
- It is easy to observe the changes of the fog color multiplier and fog density and its overall effect on visibility by moving your perspective view underwater.
- After you have moved your camera to an appropriate view, adjust the fog color multiplier and fog density to 0.1 and 0.02 respectively. This setting gives a decent color on the surface of the water as well as a good view distance underwater.
Our final changes will be to the level's environmental affection on the ocean material, which we applied earlier.
Under the Environment tab in the RollupBar, locate the Ocean Animation parameters:
- We should first adjust the direction of the virtual wind being applied to our water. To do this, first set the WindSpeed to 8 so as to be able to clearly see in which direction the wind is animating the water.
- Next, set the wind direction to a desired value, in this case set it to 4.
- Bring the wind speed back to a realistic value around 3.
- Finally, we will adjust the size of the waves.
- Extreme settings will cause malformations in the waves, so observe these changes closely.
- For our purposes, a slightly higher than normal wave height can be achieved by setting Waves Size to 0.5 and by setting the Waves Amount to 1.
The environmental parameters of the water and its corresponding time of day parameters are saved within the level.
Using latest graphic card shader programmability, CryENGINE does not suffer from Z buffer intersection with the terrain, but rather gets nice beach foam and underwater fog.
You may want to know how the Caustics rendering works or how to animate the water parameters. You might also want to know about the technology used in the CryENGINE for water free from transformation rendering.
The time of day parameters for the Ocean can be animated just like any other value in the time of day.
Caustics are used by default in CryENGINE 3. Caustics are rendered as material layer, so all objects below water can be affected in and changed in real time.
- Very important for realistic water look
- Extra rendering pass, can handle opaque/transparent, can be done in a deferred way, but we lack some data such as per pixel normals to give an interesting look
- Based on real sun direction projection
- Procedural composed using three layers
- Chromatic dispersion used
- Darken slightly to simulate a wet surface
- Stencil pre-pass helps a little bit on performance
CryENGINE 3 animates the water through an FFT algorithm on the CPU. There is a unique advantage to this as we get even physics interation, entities, or objects floating on the waves reacting when you jump on them and this works very naturally.
Additionally, normals maps translation four normal maps layers
- High frequency/low frequency
- Animated along water flow direction