how to improve a shoreline with transparency/fadeout and particles/foam?

noktek

Hello there everyone. Me and my mate are currently working on a small prototype and weve found ourselves in troubles when looking at the sea shoreline. ATM sea is basically a plane intersecating the world mesh, thus resulting in a quite boring shoreline (see picture). We would like some kind of fadeout starting form where the sea meets the strand and going maybe 2 meters inside direction sea. we also want some kind of foam happening on that area. The sea level should be dynamic (think high tide / low tide). does anyone have an idea on how to do that theoretically and or thecnically? we're using 3dsm and unity.

regards

below:


what the shore looks like atm

what we want the shore to look like
(alpha fadeout, multiply, maybe particlefoam, else painted on texture, maybe even wet sand)

Eric Chadwick

I don't know Unity very well, but waves along a shore can be very complex. Especially since you're talking about tides.

If you keep the water at the same height, you can easily model a loop of triangles hugging the shore, so then you can apply a material with transparency just along the edge (to improve performance). Vertex alpha works great for this.

A scrolling texture of very small crashing waves can work well. Large crashing waves, not so much. Particles get expensive really fast.

Take a close look at other games, see how they do it.

Crysis uses a shader approach, looks like they're blending in a bubbly-water shader using edge-detection. Looks pretty good, and handles tides well.