how to improve a shoreline with transparency/fadeout and particles/foam?
polycounter lvl 7
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)
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)
Replies
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.