Water rendering... help!
 

Hi,

I'm back with more visual-related questions. I'm at the moment just finished reading GPU Gems book 1, and would like to implement Cg water effects (chapter1) along with the underwater caustics effects (chapter2) in vizard.

How is this done in vizard? I'm guessing this would be similar to the detail texture Farhizzo implemented earlier in sept (multiplying texture value with greyscale-detail) . Am I correct to say that in vizard I will have to have 3 or 4 layers of texture on one water object? (colour, detail, normal and specular onto a plane).

Is there a built in feature in Beta2 that does this? Thank you for your response, have a great day.

Regards,
Iwan

Is the GPU Gems article available on the web? I haven't read the article, so I don't know what is involved in implementing this effect.

The next beta version of Vizard adds the ability to create multi-pass rendering effects, which should make it possible to implement a water effect. If I get time I will try to create a sample script that implements some sort of water effect, but it probably won't be before the next beta release.

cg - water effects
 

Hi,

First of all, thank you for your reply. The books are not available on the web, as far as I know. We purchased them (gpu gems 1and 2). The ideas in the books are all amazing!

The reason I asked about cg-water implementation in vizard because... we have so many simulations on land; military, mars exploration, terrain visualisation, building inspection, traffic control, car chowcases, etc... but I don't think anyone has done any on water or under water simulations (sailing/diving, submarine, etc)... yet...

Multi-pass-rendering effects? I'm looking forward to the next one! :D

The current beta version has lots of improvement compared to the previous one. I wonder what beta 3 would be like???

Keep up the great work.

Regards,
Iwan

Here's a little undersea world you might like

Nice!!!
 

Hi Jerry,

I had a look into your sample file and It was a smart way to set up an underwater scene. Really Nice!! I love it. Everything looks all right just before getting close to the seabed.

So after swimming around with the fish, I would like to ask you some questions regarding your scene;
a.) how did you set up fish wrl animation in vizard?
b.) How did you create the looping fractal animation? Your loop is really nice.

I'm currently exploring the usability of blender to get animation working in vizard (also tons of other things :P). I did try wrl format once and didn't get any animation working.

Thank you!

Regards,
Iwan

I found the animated fish model on the web. An animation can be
applied to any vrml model in Max and it exports without problem into Vizard.

The caustic video I found in a demo that came with the Directx8
software development kit.

Jerry, that undersea world is neat.

Here is a little plugin we have at worldviz that creates a distored view of the world as if you are under water. Depending on the parameters, it can create quite a psychedelic effect.

I also added it to your undersea world. The effect as well as some fog really trips things out.

The program doesn't work for me. The first error is

viz.MainScene.visible(0,viz.WORLD)
TypeError: visible() takes exactly 2 arguments (3 given)

And when I change it to viz.MainScene.visible(0) it goes on but
then gives this error

rt = viz.addRenderTexture()
AttributeError: 'module' object has no attribute 'addRenderTexture'

Maybe that's something added in R3v3 which I'm not using?

Here's a caustics video which you might like better.

Yur right, the viz.addRenderTexture() function is in the latested release.

I know this is an old thread, but I have a question.

I am wrapping the caustics.avi onto a model of the sea floor, ground.wrl, to give the underwater lighting affect and it looks really good. Then I imported the ground.wrl file into 3ds Max to make some minor modifications then exported it back to a .wrl file. Reran the program, now the caustics affect is scaled so large on the ground.wrl model that it just looks like a light is turning on and off. The other models in my scene, rocks and such, that I use the same caustics.avi on still look good, but the ground.wrl looks bad. I tried to change the scale of the caustics.avi on the ground.wrl model, but it does not seem to change anything. Any thoughts on why importing/exporting the model to/from 3ds Max would have this affect?

Any thoughts or help would be appreciated.

The texture coordinates of the ground model could have been modified. How did you change the model in 3ds Max?

My goal was to remove the palm trees from the ground model, so on my first attempt I did just that then exported back to the original file type (.wrl). When that did not work I tried to import then export without making any changes to the model and the same problem still occured, so it must happen during the import or export using 3ds Max. I tried several times changing the import and export settings, but nothing seemed to change the results.

How would I go about changing the texture coordinates?

Hi Lee,

To start off, I recommend switching to using the OpenSceneGraph format instead of WRL. OpenSceneGraph is Vizard's native model format, so it supports the widest gamut of features for models used in Vizard. The texture scale upon export should be much more reliable as well.

WRL, on the other hand, is a legacy format stored in plain text (loads slowly, can't embed images), and hasn't been updated in years.