Shore Foam Edge Blend

[wave-harmonic]

Shore Foam Edge Blend

[huwb]

Thanks for the discussion!

I added a tweakable variable to control the blend-in depth to the material - "Foam Feather Depth". I tried it quite small (0.04) and I think it improved it. I'd be curious to hear what you guys settle on if you do tweak it.

I still have things on my list that are more core to the ocean than a shoreline wetness sim, and I'm not sure when I'll get onto that, so I added it as an improvement direction and closed this issue - hope that makes sense. Reopen if not.

@GeorgeDziov yes you're welcome to contact me via email - my contact is near the top of the README.

[Midda-C]

Yeah using a depth blend or something to just soften the edges would be great.

[huwb]

Thanks guys, agreed. I added a slight feather. I went ahead and pushed it as i think it is already an improvement. And i could reuse data im already sampling in the shader, so thats a good result!

Is this what you guys had in mind? Let me know.

[Midda-C]

Yep, that's basically what I was thinking. Works well on the foam, however it doesn't look like the actual water surface itself is being feathered on the edge.

Any chance it could go to completely transparent at the very edge there? Also, a property on the material to adjust the fade distance would probably be needed so projects of different styles/looks can get the result they desire.

[huwb]

oh interesting. i think it does, in terms of scatter colour (blueness). but the sharp shading difference you see is due to the water reflecting the sky etc. in this case i'm not sure if it would be appropriate to blend the reflectivity.

probably what is weird is that the land is not wet. if the land was wet then it would be shiny like the water and probably make this less jarring. the landscape could sample the water height and probably do something to simulate wetness, i could explore this after looking at the lighting/foam stuff if interesting?

[Midda-C]

oh interesting. i think it does, in terms of scatter colour (blueness). but the sharp shading difference you see is due to the water reflecting the sky etc. in this case i'm not sure if it would be appropriate to blend the reflectivity.

Oh right, so you're not using regular alpha opacity to achieve the transparent effect? If not, that makes sense. Fading using opacity would (I think) fade out the reflection as well as a result.

probably what is weird is that the land is not wet. if the land was wet then it would be shiny like the water and probably make this less jarring. the landscape could sample the water height and probably do something to simulate wetness, i could explore this after looking at the lighting/foam stuff if interesting?

Yeah I didn't think of that, the land being wet would also mask it, if their reflectivity was approximately equal at the water's edge. I assume you'd have to do that on the land shader though, correct? Our terrain is procedurally generated, so we have a fairly complex customised terrain shader to work with that, so I guess we'd need to duplicate that in our shader ourselves (and by we, I mean Dizzy :P). But yeah, as a general solution, that sounds good.

Of course, @GeorgeDziov submitted this issue, so I don't want to just hijack it. What's your take, @GeorgeDziov?

[GeorgeDziov]

@Midda-C you read my mind in previous post and @huwb wet shore idea is fantastic, I'm all hands for that one!

Regarding foam itself - maybe make foam a bit closer to shore so blue part on the edge is less visible or add a foam to shore distance property? Thought of that because most projects have different world scale so while shore foam looks perfect at one scale it may look a tad too far in another just like in screenshots above.

I'm also really tempted to say yes to some veeery small almost unnoticeable reflection blending to hide it under foam (hope my suggestion doesn't sound too ridiculous).

offtop: btw where can I ask non-issue water/ocean stuff? Is email ok?

[dizzy2003]

Re wet terrain, a few handy functions that we can paste into the terrain shader would be great. For each pixel you would need to know how long it was since it was last under the water height. Just thinking on the fly if the world was rendered plan view, with the terrain renderered first just to the z buffer then the water rendered white doing a z test. then every white pixel is wet. This texture is faded out a bit each game turn, with effectively any pixels under the water reset to white. (the two textures need to be combined, the faded and the fresh one with a max blend) This would give a world space texture that can be sampled to apply any needed darkening/increase in shinyness for wetness

…

On Tue, May 22, 2018 at 8:23 AM, Huw Bowles ***@***.***> wrote: Thanks for the discussion! I added a tweakable variable to control the blend-in depth to the material - "Foam Feather Depth". I tried it quite small (0.04) and I think it improved it. I'd be curious to hear what you guys settle on if you do tweak it. I still have things on my list that are more core to the ocean than a shoreline wetness sim, and I'm not sure when I'll get onto that, so I added it as an improvement direction and closed this issue - hope that makes sense. Reopen if not. @GeorgeDziov <https://github.com/GeorgeDziov> yes you're welcome to contact me via email - my contact is near the top of the README. — You are receiving this because you are subscribed to this thread. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#10 (comment)>, or mute the thread <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AOU9GEGsuzhhJDK2-6vasLeYzqZmzF-4ks5t0z5EgaJpZM4T6S5K> .

[GeorgeDziov]

This feather option certainly gives a lot more flexibility! Pity there's no reflection blending though but I think it's better to wait for wet shore. Anyway foam looks so much better now, big thanks for that!