acerola_t
patreon
Plan for next video(s)
🕑 Added 2023-06-08 04:58:47 +0000 UTCHello everyone I've got a bit of an update for the next video regarding water rendering.
The project is going to be composed of two main parts, the fft simulation and the entire water shader itself. Both of these are going to be a lot of work and require pretty in depth explanations, so in favor of not making another 30+ minute video I will be splitting it up into two. I know I've said many times that I don't want to do multi part video subjects, but if I do it right then this won't feel like a two parter but instead two videos that can stand alone. Separating this subject into two videos will allow for more in depth explanations as well and help mitigate burnout by keeping me from working on one thing for too long.
The first video will be about the water shader itself in a shallow water context utilizing some flow maps to fake fluid movement. I'll try to go over a lot of fundamentals of physically based rendering like what a brdf is, fresnel reflections, screenspace reflections, environment reflections, subsurface scattering, etc. I'll also try to do some fake caustics. The main point of the video will be how still water (ponds and such) usually looks in games. I currently don't have a good idea for what the title should be, so if you have suggestions let me know!
The second video will be about ocean wave simulation utilizing the inverse fast fourier transform, this is the method that everyone uses for the most part (Crysis, AC: Black Flag, Sea Of Thieves, etc.) to render oceans. The video will cover how the fft converts the frequencies that drive the simulation to a height map for vertex displacement and a number of different maps for the pbr water shader. It'll also go over how our shallow water shader converts to the ocean shader. Since ocean rendering is very intensive I'll try to go over as many optimizations as I can. The working title for this video is "Simulating An Entire Ocean" which I think is a good title.
Moving forward after this "series" I will begin mentioning in polls if I think a topic will require a second video, unless this shift in content format fails miserably. I hope I can show off some basic water shader stuff soon!
Comments
Acerola
I probably won't end up doing any real extinction stuff for the water since I want it to be as real time as possible, but maybe if I stumble on a cool enough paper. The LUT idea is really cool!
Xaymar
Wasn't aware games were using FFTs for ocean waves, now I'm looking forward to seeing what this ends up as. Are you also looking into simulating proper color extinction for water transparency? I find that a lot of (game) developers tend to forget that water isn't a solid, so there's usually a massive disconnect between above and below surface.Especially when you live near the coast, where water is in multiple directions within walking distance, game water doesn't really look great. In my own Unreal Engine based games, I currently use a 1 dimensional LUT, where the index is the depth in meters. It allows for really precise fine tuning, and this 1 dimensional LUT can even be used for the fog that is applied underwater.
Yakvi
Julian Baumgartner at https://www.youtube.com/@BaumgartnerRestoration has this episodic approach for complex projects: He records the whole thing, preps it into 20-minute chunks, and releases them on weekly basis. He also posts patron-only "Epilogue" videos where he answers patrons questions. Works very well, if you ask me :)
