Hello,

Is it possible within the Esenthel Engine to create a water surface affect similar to the one seen in the included swamp photo?

   

If so, is this done through the use of the World Editor and water tab or does it require the creation of additional custom shaders? I've not had much luck being able to change the surface color of water from within the world editor as it always ends up mirroring the sky above it and the available color controls seem to affect the appearance below the surface of the water only.

I am not looking for someone to do this for me. I'm simply asking whether it is within the abilities of the engine at this time and whether it lands more in the lap of the environmental artist or in the lap of the programmer.

Thank you

To the original question: if you keep the water plane flat without waves (which makes sense, since this is a swamp) you could also fake that effect by adding a manually created custom mesh plane with alpha blended "patches", placed on top of the water plane, simulating the swamp effect in your picture. The other option of course would be a custom water shader.

Hello, unfortunately there is no reflection coverage map for the water, however as Abril pointed out you can manually draw some blended meshes to simulate the coverage.

Due to multiple requests the thread was moderated, and posts offtopic were removed.
Please stay on-topic, thank you very much

(03-08-2012 06:07 PM)aceio76 Wrote:  Guys, I was mistaken. The body of water I was looking at was a low portion of the terrain where it was touching the sea level so I was seeing the ebb and flow effect. It was not a lake. On lakes and on rivers, the water surface stays flat, so a blended object is a viable solution. The benefit of using a flat plane mesh is that you can position is precisely where you want it, whereas if this was done with a shader, you are likely not able to tell it where the floating objects are.

That will work, until someone/something makes waves. So as long as it should be still water only.

Actually, just looked at pic again.

If I was doing that scene, I might try the normal reflective surface to pickup sky etc, but with a transparency factor. Then make the tree stumps double length with one half underwater, mirror-repeat the texture at waterline (but I'm not sure if Esenthel can do that - haven't tried yet), and a deep fog layer to absorb underwater trunks. This normally works well to simulate reflection with the benefit that you can tweak it.