Stuff with water

[nub]

Just me being bored to death and "mapping around." It isn't really finished, nor is it meant to be some project. I'm just being creative I guess.

Anyway, you can't really see it through pictures, but the waterfalls on either side create a flow of water in to the center. I put in some weak trigger_push volumes to simulate the physics of the flowing water, and I put some tin cans in the map and tossed them in and they move around pretty cool-like. They start a bit fast, dashing from one side of the hall to the other, but gradually slow down and eventually come to a steady tumble in the center. Pretty fun to watch, could make for something interesting...maybe...












The last picture is just showing off my simple little pool kind of light.
Habboi this is not your model, I don't have that anymore. I made my own in 3DS Max

Anyway, nothing super special, but give me any feedback that you can.


PS: The mist above the water was achieved with func_smokevolume.

[Chopium]

Looks very cool. Don't like the flat ceiling though.

[nub]

Yeah I think I'm going to do something with the light fixtures to make the ceiling more interesting. The pool light doesn't really fit well on the ceiling like that. It's better looking when on a wall near or under water.

I'll probably add vents and pipes running along the ceiling or something, just to add some eye candy.


One thing I would absolutely love would be a nice animated caustic overlay effect for the water. That would really make the center look cool.

[srredfire]

Video please.

[nub]

I'll attempt a video, however FRAPS has never liked my sound card. Well, I guess sound doesn't matter much at all.


Anyway, I actually just found a program called Caustics Generator that I used to create a nice 512x512 animated caustics texture, then I converted it to VTF and made an overlay VMT for it. However, after spending like 20 minutes placing overlays and making the caustics as seamless as possible on corners of the walls, I compiled (without errors) and they simply did not render. Totally lame because it would have looked awesome in-game:



I don't know if it's because a lot of the info_overlay objects go inside brushes, but I had to do that in order to make the caustics seamless at the corners and shit. I might just have to make a func_illusionary brush with the texture applied to the top face. But doing that I won't be able to place it right on a face, it'll have to be 1 unit above, and that's just crappy.


EDIT: I got the caustics working finally, and I am currently uploading a video to Youtube.

[Armageddon]

Is that water going dynamically up and down? It looks like the HL1 water physics.

[nub]

It's just a scrolling stream texture on subdivided displacements. I'd LOVE to have a model that would simulate a water surface, but that's probably never going to happen. We'll just have to wait for what Valve has in store for us. I'm pretty sure there's been word on dynamic fluids in Portal, but that's probably just with particle physics.

EDIT:

Watch in 720p for best quality.

[[JFG]Propaganda]

Shit man I was thinking about this very effect last night on my way home from the office. I want to use it in a cellar area that's flooded. Any chance of a tutorial or vmf of this nub?

[Mess]

nice caustics, but the caustics you have are for quite still water, and your water is all fast-flowing.

[nub]

Yeah you're probably right about that. I'm trying to figure out what does what in this Caustics Generator program. Anyone who's interested, it can be downloaded here.

I set the background color to black and then fiddled with the sliders on the left side until I got a caustic texture that looked nice. I set the frame count to 60 (the more frames the smoother and longer the animation will be). After that I ticked the "save output" option, gave the output a name, and chose an empty folder for the destination and hit "render animation." After that you should have each individual frame saved as a BMP in whatever folder you chose. Open up VTF Edit and go to File - Import, and browse to the folder with all the frames and start CTRL + Clicking from the last frame to the first frame. Until you have all frames selected. Hit ok/open and then choose your desired import options (just make sure the texture type is set to animated texture). After that hit ok and VTF Edit will start processing each frame in to an animated texture. Once it's complete you can preview the animation within VTF Edit. If it's satisfactory, hit File - Save and save it as whatever you want. You now have an animated caustics texture.


This is my VMT:

Code: Select all

"LightmappedGeneric"
{
 "$basetexture" "waterfall/caustics_overlay"
 "$additive" 1
 "$decal" 1

 "Proxies"
{
 "AnimatedTexture"
{
   "animatedtexturevar" "$basetexture"
   "animatedtextureframenumvar" "$frame"
   "animatedtextureframerate" 30.00
   }
    }
}

Very simple. I used $additive to make it translucent, however it also makes it brighter than I'd like. If I'm correct, caustics are never brighter than the surrounding environment.


Anyway, Mess, do you think you could help me create a more suited caustics for fast-moving water?

[Armageddon]

Here is a great water fall tutorial that looks alot like yours if anyone wants to see it.

[nub]

Yeah that's what I saw on FPSB. I instead used the waterfall texture for the waterfall props in de_wanda and created a normal map from it. I think it looks way better than a generic fiber filter texture. The stream texture in the ground is one I made using the militia river texture and a custom texture I made. I just overlapped the two textures and used a specific layer option to make them blend right, then did the same with the alpha maps. Works well for its purpose.

[Mess]

i've just made a 42MB animated caustic, 1024x1024 32 frames :O must have done something wrong

[Zipfinator]

Having it at 1024x1024 is what's wrong. Too big!

[Mess]

it looks sexy though... will try a 50-frame 512

also, if anyone has any ideas as to what compression to use that would be helpful!