Tuesday, August 25, 2009

Water Shader Update & Atmosphere Added

I reintegrated the atmosphere shell/shader and updated the water shell with a heightmap of the terrain under it so I can have the water depth affect the transparency and color and I think it adds a lot - although now everything looks tropical - which I don't mind.

Water Depth Effects:



Also I made my underwater texture have fake caustics (static) on them which is subtle but nice:

Fake Caustics texture:


From Above:


And here are some pictures of the atmosphere and water shader together from various spots on the planet.













You can view all the My First Planet Images in the gallery section on my website

Notes:
- I pretty much eliminated banding in the generated terrain texture images by increasing the resolution of my terrain height maps from 8bit to 16bit.
- The atmosphere still has problems and needs tweaking - there is no sun and the sky to space transition is too abrupt amongst other things.
- PSSM VSM shadows slowed the frame rate down too like 30-40 fps so I left them out for now.
- I need to solve the issue of how noticable texture repeating is from up in the atmosphere and I need to add some noise to the texture generation to make things more interesting.

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