Week 3.2 - Wrapping up the Water Brief (for now)

Since the first hand-in date is this Friday, I am currenty wrapping up the project for now. There are still changes and improvements I want to make, but I will focus on that, when I have time for polishing.

Here is the artstation link: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/bav3on

1 - Shore interaction 
Since I still had some time left, I decided to add water interaction to my object master material. The rocks and also the landscape now have a waterline and/or foam on it, depending on the water height.
I made another version of the Water Master Material, where I exchanged the Gerstner Wave Parameters for a parameter collection, so I can use the same parameters across multiple Materials. In the Material it ended up looking like this:

Overview Opaque Master Material

Waterline/Foam Logic

It works by calculating the water height compared to the object in Worldspace and then masking out the area underwater or for the foam a "band".
This is how the effect ended up looking in the level:

Shore Interaction

Of course this solution is far from perfect, however now the water doesn't feel quite as cut off from the environment anymore.
Also a nice effect, even though it was actually accidental: as the shore/object surface angle to the water is getting steeper it looks like the foam is running down the surface quicker.

2 - Water Material Changes
After putting the water in the level I noticed, that the normals started looking very weird in the distance, so I added some extra logic in the material to blend to flat Normals in the Distance. I used the same for specularity, so now the water reflects the sky more in the distance.

2 - Environment
I ended up not using the sand and cliff texture I made in week 2, as I got better results just layering the rocks I sculpted. Instead of the sand I made a very quick and simple gravel texture, resolution is 512 by 512.

Gravel Texture

As for the environment here is an overview of the general setup.

And here are a few views from the playable area.

3 - Reflection and future improvements
Overall I am very happy with the outcome of this project and I feel like I learned a great deal whilst working on it. For example it was the first time using render targets and I now feel like I got a better understanding of how they can be used to create dynamic effects.


1) INTERACTIVE WATER:I would like to change the interactive water part to essentially follow the player, so that it works no matter where the player is with the same Scene Capture. At the moment it only covers a 20 by 20 meter area. I actually build a version, where the scene capture followed the player, however it affected the ripples produced by other objects in a weird way, changing their direction.
Also objects moving slowly produce very quick ripples, which is unrealistic. Since the ripple logic was not made by me and I spend most of my time on this project creating the water shader and environment I would like to see if I can change the math behind the ripples to improve the effect.
Additionally I would like to maybe add buoyancy to objects and slow them down, when they enter the water.

2) DAY/NIGHT CYCLE
Since ended up linking the sun position for the reflections in my water material to the directional light, I would like to add a day night cycle to the environment, to better show of the effect and also extend it to also add moon reflections.


4 - Resources used
To create the water effect I used some textures included in Unreal Engine's Starter and Engine Content. These are the following:
T_Detail_Rocky_N
T_Ground_Grass_N
water_d
I reduced the texture size of those to 512 to fit the texture budget constraints.