Faking reflections- Lake environment

vj_box

Guys,
I am currently working on a lake environment which needs to have a convincing shore line effect and the reflections on the water. The water can be animated using UV animation. I am wondering how to achieve convincing faked reflections. Since the budget is for a handheld game,we don't really have the luxury of using shaders. Any help in this regard will be great!



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Thanks in advance

Piflik

Hmmm...being handheld you might also not have a budget for duplicate geometry...that would have been my suggestion...

PhilipK

Yes, I suppose flipping a duplicate, tho you could make that duplicate way less detailed and it may work perhaps?

Millenia

Bake a higher version frame by frame and animate the texture? Dunno.

Mark Dygert

Is your view locked to one camera one angle and never moves? Like you'll be fishing on a dock instead of trawling around a lake.

If you're mobile, I think design is going to be key. Keep a lot of things back off he shoreline so you can minimize the amount of things you have to fake. Probably fake just the shoreline itself. You could try using planes hovering above the surface, around the shoreline as a reflection. Or like Piflik suggested dupe just the shoreline geometry mirroring it.

Maybe add a highlight on a plane that follows the boat around and always stays in view. This would fake the sky and would fade or dither the farther away it gets.

vj_box

Vig wrote: »

Is your view locked to one camera one angle and never moves? Like you'll be fishing on a dock instead of trawling around a lake.

If you're mobile, I think design is going to be key. Keep a lot of things back off he shoreline so you can minimize the amount of things you have to fake. Probably fake just the shoreline itself. You could try using planes hovering above the surface, around the shoreline as a reflection. Or like Piflik suggested dupe just the shoreline geometry mirroring it.

Maybe add a highlight on a plane that follows the boat around and always stays in view. This would fake the sky and would fade or dither the farther away it gets.

Thanks Vig, The view is not really restricted and we would actually move the cam,like you would turn up to a certain angle. I now have a convincing effect with baked reflection texture. But i am still looking at ways of improving the same. Thanks for the ideas.

arrangemonk

how about a 360° view (a ball with cuts where the water is) and the water part animated (few frames) and only the fish and some other things are animated
(for this you also would need a plane to calculate where the fish is transparent (under water) and visible (over water) with somme splash, so the noone sees the switch to full visibility