waterfalls for in-game

zbrush_newbie

Hi

Has anyone come across a good way of making waterfalls in maya for in game use. I`m using the tried and tested method of lofting across a few splines that run over the rocks and then scrolling uv`s but its tedious work when you have about 20-30 waterfalls to do.
I can use some particles but not many , just thinking if there is another quicker way?

Thanks

Eric Chadwick

Look at how other games do it. Typically they make a couple fixed-size waterfall meshes (short falls, wide falls, tall falls), arrange the rocks around it, add the bottom spray particles, put some rocks up top to hide the scrolling end, then save all those pieces as a group (a prefab) to reuse again and again.

For example
http://www.youtube.com/v/aVVAC5SMSag

haiddasalami

Best example to check out is Skyrim's waterfalls. They use pretty much the same method Eric mentioned. You might be able to add some particles to the mesh depending on the type of waterfall you're going for.

zbrush_newbie

ok thanks. Actually i`m trying to create a scene with something like 30 very high waterfalls cascading down a rock face that are in the distance.

I`ve found i can use a shrinkwrap plugin for maya to snap the waterfalls to the rocks individually. so its not so painful, just have to copy and paste each waterfall and manually adjust it to the rocks structure.

Eric Chadwick

Reminds me of a map in Panzar: Forged By Chaos, made with CryEngine 3.



http://www.youtube.com/watch?&v=n5t0LPLS_GU#t=20s

passerby

you can make just 2 other 3 different ones, and scale them and arrange the rocks around them differently. for variations.

Isaac_Newbton

check out the falls in Skyrim, they are just a bunch of square particles. you can also do a very long plane with animated texture and alpha.