Waterfalls, and rapids, and moving water in streams, creeks, and rivers.

[agentronin]

In the Inventory path: Library/Textures/Waterfalls there are several textures meant to work together to create waterfalls. Is there a tutorial somewhere that instructs how these textures are meant to be used to create waterfalls?

My interest is not in just making realistic waterfalls, but also realistic as possible moving water in rapids, streams, creeks, and rivers.

 

 

[SeattleChris]

On 10/21/2022 at 1:17 AM, agentronin said:

In the Inventory path: Library/Textures/Waterfalls there are several textures meant to work together to create waterfalls. Is there a tutorial somewhere that instructs how these textures are meant to be used to create waterfalls?

My interest is not in just making realistic waterfalls, but also realistic as possible moving water in rapids, streams, creeks, and rivers.

 

 

I don't know how familiar you are with scripting, but you would need to create mesh objects, and then animate the textures to move along their faces. So the tutorial to accomplish that would involve whatever software you were using (Blender, for example) as well as some work with the Linden Scripting Language. The LSL portal has great code snippets, and I would be surprised if you couldn't find some basic waterfall scripts available there.

For inspiration and maybe a little to see how they did it, check out Studio Skye's waterfall building set.

(Sorry if this is stuff you already know.)

[ChinRey]

On 10/21/2022 at 10:17 AM, agentronin said:

My interest is not in just making realistic waterfalls, but also realistic as possible moving water in rapids, streams, creeks, and rivers.

I wasn't going to reply to this post since I haven't really done that much work on water effects and can hardly claim to be an expert (yet). But since you've had so little response so far, I'll try to give the little advice I can.

You do not want to use the textrues in the library if you want anything like realism. They tend to be too blue for a start and they're also based on the idea of having multiple layers of textures moving at different speeds. Back in the days of prims only this was the only way to avoid a too obvious pattern in the waterflow but with mesh - and even with sculpts - we can add slight distortions in the geometry to achieve the same effect only much better.

As SeattleChris said, you really should take a look at Skye's water meshes, not only the waterfalls but also the rivers. Alex Bader, the Skye owner and creator, has really done his homework there and his water features are among the best we have in SL.

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I'm not sure how helpful these illustrations are. They are from some quick and dirty tests I did a few years ago but never followed up on and the only animated file format we can upload to this forum is gif so the image quality is horrendously bad.

Here's a static pic of the full test set:

The surface I used here is a sculpt I happened to have at hand. If I was to make an actual waterfall or river I would use a mesh of course but as I said, this was just a quick test. All textures are non-alpha with transparency added (70% to the one to the right, 20% for the other three.)

The two tests to the left are examples how not to do it. The first one uses a water surface texture with soft ripples:

And you can easily see even on this low quality gif why it doesn't work:

The second has a texture with a bluish tint:

It's not anywhere near as blue as some of the water textures in the library but as you can see, it's still way too much:

(I've hit the upload file limit now so I have to continue in a new post.)

Edited October 23, 2022 by ChinRey

[ChinRey]

The third test uses a more gray/whiteish water texture with a greenish tint, one from Moard Ling's huge collection of open source textures:

This is more like it:

Unfortunately this is also where you can't really see the actual quality on a low rez animated gif but you should be able to see how much better it is than the first two.

Finally here's one with an almost pure crayscale texture:

This isn't even a water texture, it's rock, yet the result is far better than the first two and just as good as the third:

That's all I have, I'm afraid. I really should have done more on water features but there's so much else to build so I never had time. I still hope it was useful to you.

Edited October 23, 2022 by ChinRey

[Love Zhaoying]

The way I did it was, use 2 semitransparent prims in the same space (same x/y/z coordinates), with different water textures moving at different rates. I found that worked really well. 
*Edit* forgot that I actually used 3 sometimes.

Edited October 23, 2022 by Love Zhaoying