render to texture question

Turoid

Hi guys,

A quick question, is it possible to render vertex colors to a texture (with max 8's render to texture tool) ? If so.. how could I do this.

Thanks!

Noren

You could simply put the vertex colors in your diffuse slot and render a diffuse map.
Texporter offered the possibility to render out vertex colors, too, if I recall right.

Turoid

Thanks, a vertex colors material works great with render to texture.

JKMakowka

While we are on the topic:

The game Vietcong had these nice animated textures of small water streams that seem to have been rendered from a fluid simulation of some sort.

Anyone got an idea how one could do this (in a nicely looping way)?

MoP

One of our programmers wrote a Max plugin that would create a subdivided plane which did tiling, loopable water ripples.

JKMakowka

Hmm that sounds nice too, but not what I ment I think.

In Vietcong it looked like this:

Eric Chadwick

I remember that game, and I looked at that water up close. Looked like plain old video to me, crossfade-looped.

JKMakowka

You might be right, but it sure looked pretty good.

Actually running water is one of the big downfalls of current water rendering. Sure a calm see or even waves on an ocean look great with the right shader, but as soon as it is just a small stream it looks really bad.
Well I recently saw a vid from Crysis which certainly improved this sort of rendering quite a bit... lets see how it looks in the final game.

Panupat

Are there any tutorial for making in game water? It's one thing I can never make it look good.

Mark Dygert

Normally engine specific, most techniques involve an animated texture. Very rarely do they involve water physics, in fact I can't think of a single game that has water as water.

There are some really really high end plug-ins like RealFlow used for movies and I'm pretty sure you "COULD" render out some simulations and use them as animated textures. I "THINK" the RealFlow particle system has looping capabilities, or they where trying to get that to work, or something... I can't remember where I read that... If all you would use RealFlow for is rendering out animated water, you're wasting your time, money and the plug-in. Might as well just set up a small aqueduct and take some stop motion footage, which is what I think they did for Vietcong?

RealFlow
http://www.nextlimit.com/realflow/what.htm

JKMakowka

Btw if it really just was video footage, how did they get transparent textures out of it that aren't actually showing the original ground it was filmed with?
By some sort of bluescreen methode? Seems like a awefull lot of work just to get some nice water.

Eric Chadwick

Been a while since I looked at that game, but it looked to me like someone went to a real creek and shot some video looking down at some small rapids. I don't remember any transparency though, except something like a painted falloff on the edges.

ppenguin, not many quality tuts out there I'm afraid. Some water links here, though mostly programmer material.
http://www.vterrain.org/Water/

Hydrophobia might be interesting, but I doubt it.
http://www.bladeinteractive.com/hydro.html

JKMakowka

Ok you might be right that it wasn't actually really transparent. I would check, but I am too lazy to install it just for that