Blazekun: overlay's & puddles of water

[The Dark Elf]

Regarding : http://www.halflife2.net/forums/showpost.php?p=337713&postcount=402

Basically, from what I can tell. What he means is you can't get the water shader to work as an overlay, so puddles done with those, which I'm assuming you wanted because they'd naturally have more realistic looking edges without requiring a ton of brushes/leaves to create. Wont be possible. BUT, you can still fake it. Surfaces can contain all sorts of information now, aswell as being animated. So you can always fake a decent looking puddle of water using reflections and a sequence of ripples, then it would simply be a case of setting something up to create a splash if you move through the puddle. The sloshing sound that you'd get walking through water. I'm guessing will be entirely possible also, in HL1 each surface texture had some information attached to it that told the engine what material it was made from, so it would use the correct footstep/shot sound. I imagine a similar principal applies with overlays?

I dunno, im just guessing that would work.. Any employee of Valve want to confirm it or help explain it better? please?

 

[BlazeKun]

Regarding : http://www.halflife2.net/forums/showpost.php?p=337713&postcount=402

Basically, from what I can tell. What he means is you can't get the water shader to work as an overlay, so puddles done with those, which I'm assuming you wanted because they'd naturally have more realistic looking edges without requiring a ton of brushes/leaves to create. Wont be possible. BUT, you can still fake it. Surfaces can contain all sorts of information now, aswell as being animated. So you can always fake a decent looking puddle of water using reflections and a sequence of ripples, then it would simply be a case of setting something up to create a splash if you move through the puddle. The sloshing sound that you'd get walking through water. I'm guessing will be entirely possible also, in HL1 each surface texture had some information attached to it that told the engine what material it was made from, so it would use the correct footstep/shot sound. I imagine a similar principal applies with overlays?

I dunno, im just guessing that would work.. Any employee of Valve want to confirm it or help explain it better? please?

I was amazed at the complexity of Brians answer. I can hardly make heads or tails of the apparent shader options he's talking about but whatever. I just think it would be incredibly useful to be able to make a little overlay blob have shader options so you could have a puddle that you can stretch and stuff, maybe an oil leak in a parking spot, or some shiny ice parts on a frozen lake. It really has a lot of uses other than just "water" I just can't think of many = )

 

[The Dark Elf]

I was amazed at the complexity of Brians answer. I can hardly make heads or tails of the apparent shader options he's talking about but whatever. I just think it would be incredibly useful to be able to make a little overlay blob have shader options so you could have a puddle that you can stretch and stuff, maybe an oil leak in a parking spot, or some shiny ice parts on a frozen lake. It really has a lot of uses other than just "water" I just can't think of many = )

I like that it was complex, I imagine the coders out there are probably grinning thinking of all the sorts of shaders they'll be able to create.

You could always use that displacement modeling to create a little dip in the ground and then place a brush over it with the water shader.. In theory you could then animate that by moving it. But while that worked fine before, I've no idea what effect that would have on the water shader, if it would even work atall. And besides that goes back to the hard edged unrealistic look.

If your a coder though, I'm sure there's nothing stopping you from creating a shader that appears more like Ice or Oil.. I'm not up on what DX9 is capable of, but by the looks of it, it can do fresnel effects, now if that can be used as a kind of alpha channel you could have a slowly undulating rainbow colored effect, which is smoothly faded out at a certain viewing angle. Would work for oil like surface, along with some reflection. It's quite possible in pre-rendered surfaces, I've no idea if DX9 could do that.. I imagine its possible though, hope so heh.

For Ice, just something not as reflective or transparent should do the trick. Need a DX familiar coder or someone from Valve on this cause I'm out of my depth with DX shaders really

 

[BlazeKun]

I really wanna see a good grass shader, something that will stretch the texture away from the players view depending on what way he's looking, would give it a psuedo 3d effect and make it look like real grass if done right. SHADERS ROCK!! :E