Normal maps for water shader

Nebularium

Hey folks,

Trying to create a "map" in UDK only with custom meshes, textures, shaders etc., and ran into a problem that I used to evade before - creating normal maps for water. I always used stock water textures, only modifying shader itself when needed, but now I want to create it from scratch, and can't wrap up my where should I start for water normals.

Anyone can share their thoughts on this? I tried making a heightmap in PS, then importing it to Crazybump, results weren't good, tried searching for tutorial or any advice on this but didn't find anything good. ANY help is greatly apreciated.

luna

I had a similar problem. But I think you could try to find tutorials for making ocean in UDK. UDK is powerful. You don't really need to make water from Maya to UDK.

Santewi

Just render clouds in Photoshop and then turn that into a normalmap. It doesn't look like water, but you can use the texture to distort itself.

My water shader uses only one texture, but it is panned in different directions at different scales and speeds. Then I have combined them, and used them to distort the actual normalmaps, again panned in different directions at different scales and speeds. The movement is very fluid, you can't notice individual textures and tiling is minimal.

Eric Chadwick

Clouds filter works great for water. All the water on this project was made with the same 256x256 "clouds" normal map, using different speeds and strengths in the shader. Also a little noise in the vertex shader for swells. Not made in Unreal, but same principles apply.
http://ericchadwick.com/img/mmo_worldbuilding.html

Nebularium

Thanks for advice folks. Tried the cloud thing, while not I'm not completely satisfied, they do seem to do to job fine for now. Might need additional tweaking, but should be ok for now. Thanks!

Santewi

Nebularium wrote: »

Thanks for advice folks. Tried the cloud thing, while not I'm not completely satisfied, they do seem to do to job fine for now. Might need additional tweaking, but should be ok for now. Thanks!

This is what my "distortion" part looks like:




They are all just simply blended together using lerps, then it is multiplied by something like 0.01 to tone the distortion effect down, then masked the blue channel out and the finally added into the actual normalmap texture's coordinates like this:

Nebularium

Well I'm not that worried about the shader, I feel that the normal maps themselves that I rendered don't look the way I want them to look. Also by clouds from PS+Crazybump don't give much room for customization. I was thinking about sculpting surface in Mudbox/Zbrush, but the end product was crap, don't have skill in sculpting for that I guess.

Nevertheless, cloud normals will do the job for now, and thanks for posting shader expressions

Eric Chadwick

The old Dreamscape plugin for Max had a cool water procedural. It produced a scalloped effect that was very nice. You might be able to do something similar with a tweaked Worley noise.

It looks a bit too smooth and gooey here, but at a higher resolution it looks nice.
http://www.ericchadwick.com/examples/movies/dreamscape_waterbump.mov

Nebularium

Eric Chadwick wrote: »

The old Dreamscape plugin for Max had a cool water procedural. It produced a scalloped effect that was very nice. You might be able to do something similar with a tweaked Worley noise.

It looks a bit too smooth and gooey here, but at a higher resolution it looks nice.
http://www.ericchadwick.com/examples/movies/dreamscape_waterbump.mov

Will check it out.

Nebularium

Eric Chadwick wrote: »

The old Dreamscape plugin for Max had a cool water procedural. It produced a scalloped effect that was very nice. You might be able to do something similar with a tweaked Worley noise.

It looks a bit too smooth and gooey here, but at a higher resolution it looks nice.
http://www.ericchadwick.com/examples/movies/dreamscape_waterbump.mov

I tried Dreamscape for 3ds Max and gotta say results are great. A lot better than normals from rendered clouds, though Dreamscape needed more work. Thanks for suggesting it Eric!

Eric Chadwick

Yeah. The bump map tiles, but it tiles a ton. The motion is nice tho, I like how it compresses and expands.

wailingmonkey

hey Eric...just wanted to say, really neat work on that volcano and subsequent
cloud action! Digged the breakdown you showed as well. Nice work, mister!

(apologies to OP for off-topic)

Eric Chadwick

Thanks!