Realistic prim water?

[ricobosco]

Hey everyone :)

Just wondering if anyone can knows of some good looking realistic prim water - needs to be mod so it can be resized etc.

I've looked on MP and found quite a few but most seem to be nothing more than a translucent prim with a scrolling texture on top.

I'd love something (on a sky platform) that can get as close to the Linden water that you see at ground level.  I realise that this is probably a fantasy but something that looks like actual water would be cool.

I have also experimented with some of the water scripts but not being a scripter myself I find this fiddly and it just never looks right.....

Any help would be most appreciated!

[Drongle McMahon]

It's possible to do quite well with a couple of layers, provided you have Advanced lighting turned on. Mesh can use UV map fiddling to add turbulence, but gets too expensive for large areas. The problem with large areas used to be that you had to use texture repeats and those disappear when you animate the textures. I don't know if that was ever fixed. You can do much the same with sculpties, by distorting the geometry rather than the (fixed) UV map. I put a mesh version and a prim version at Aditi(beta grid) Mesh Sandbox 3 [188,112,23] for you to look at. There's plenty of scope for adjusting these; colour, scale, meterial shininess parameters, diffuse textures, animation speed, normal maps, spec maps. If you have a look, try at different times of day. I put a light on them for night. They are rubbish without advanced lighting though.

I put a big area prim one with repeats too, to see if it's stable now..

 

 

[markkemp]

Yes it is possible provided you have the advanced lighting model feature enabled under your graphics settings. Anyone with high graphics has it enabled automatically.

There are some screenshots here if you want to see what it looks like:

https://marketplace.secondlife.com/p/Realistic-Animated-Water-Texture-Full-Perm-DT-Material-Collection/6153371

 

[Drongle McMahon]

Very nice, Mark. Do you know if repeats stay as set when the texture is animated now? It used to be that it looked like it was there until you edited or relogged, and then it would revert to 1x1 repeats. So far, the one I put out seems to have kept its repeats. So maybe that got fixed.

[markkemp]

Yes it is possible to set repeats........but (read on)....

No, the animated textures system is lacking in SL to say the least.

Plus there is the fact that for every frame of the animation sequence you are effectively dividing the texture resolution by four.....with a 1024px cap it makes it pretty much impossible. Water would require at least 16fps I recon.

I have developed a powerful script that will animate textures at 1024px resolution. However, currently there is no LSL support for llSetLinkPrimitiveParamsFast on normal an specular maps. My script currently displays the diffuse map animated, but refuses to animate the normal and specular maps. They are supposed to be working on enabling scripting of normal and specular maps but nothing new recently. I fear maybe they have moved their focus onto another project.

Currently I use a scrolling animation in this product. This type of animation you can set repeats, as I remember..........If you overlap the animated textures and use alpha layering you can effectively get something very close.

Of course none of this is really optimum. Ideally they should have provided a proceedural animated water shader for prims. I suspect the shader already exists, because they use it for sim water - the sim water is just a region sized prim anyway!!! But I believe they have not done this specifically because of the performance costs. Everyone would go nuts with 3D water.....

That's all there is to know on this topic right now I believe. The water I've made is basically as good as it gets for now sadly. When they broaden their scripting support for materials more will be possible and I'll be updating it to a frame based version!

[Drongle McMahon]

Indeed, I meant the scrolling animation. Frame animation would surely be too resource expensive. Procedural effects sound very nice, for things other than water too, but I would wonder whether it wouldn't be just as bad, consuming too much cpu/gpu resource. As it is, the scope for variety of material-based water is pretty good, and yours is a good example, but even then, we have to admit that a lot of users don't have sufficient resource to keep advanced lighting on. :matte-motes-crying:

[markkemp]

Well people are slowly upgrading their PCs so it will become more the normality over time hopefully :matte-motes-smile:

[arton Rotaru]

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markkemp wrote:

 

I have developed a powerful script that will animate textures at 1024px resolution. However,

currently there is no LSL support for llSetLinkPrimitiveParamsFast on normal an specular maps

. My script currently displays the diffuse map animated, but refuses to animate the normal and specular maps. They are supposed to be working on enabling scripting of normal and specular maps but nothing new recently. I fear maybe they have moved their focus onto another project.

---

The Second Life Viewer looks up materials data only once per second, So smoothly animating normal and specular maps with llSLPPF doesn't work all that well. The Viewer will just skip all the steps inbetween 1 second and another. I doubt they have, or had any plans to change that actually.

[markkemp]

I use some invis prims with the material textures already loaded onto their surfaces. That acts as a buffer for that problem. Or is that 1 second buffer a different issue? :matte-motes-smile:

[arton Rotaru]

You said you would like to animate material maps with llSLPPF. That would be, setting offsets, rotaion etc. within a fast paced timer. The diffuse map will update rather quickly, but normal and spec maps params update only once a second, no matter how fast the timer is paced.

[markkemp]

No, I have built an animated water texture with about 30 frames (each with diffuse, normal, specular). But LSL currently does not support the changing of normal maps. Sadly I think they expect it to be used as a tool for griefers to crash peoples' clients.....:matte-motes-impatient:

[arton Rotaru]

Well, I don't think this will work any better. But you can indeed change normal and spec maps with PRIM_NORMAL, PRIM_SPECULAR flags for quite a while actually. But the 1 second lookup still remains.