Normal maps for water shader
polycounter lvl 7
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.
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.
Replies
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.
http://ericchadwick.com/img/mmo_worldbuilding.html
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:
Nevertheless, cloud normals will do the job for now, and thanks for posting shader expressions
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.
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!
cloud action! Digged the breakdown you showed as well. Nice work, mister!
(apologies to OP for off-topic)