Water variation still occuring

Started by bigben, April 11, 2007, 08:59:32 PM

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bigben

I noticed this after adding the water back into my high-res panorama.  The TGD has a seed value in the water shader (and it's the same value as the previous version of the TGD) but the separate tiles are still getting different wave patterns.

I'm re-rendering these frames after adding keyframes for the seed value to the first and last frame to see if it makes any difference.

old_blaggard

On the top one, it looks like different reflections completely; have you checked to make sure that your clouds haven't decided to start moving between frames?
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Oshyan

Ben, I've seen something similar recently, although previous tests seemed to show that it was fixed. From what I can see it stays consistent (for me at least) across multiple frames but then jumps suddenly. I'm looking into it and I'll post if I find anything further about it.

- Oshyan

bigben

#3
The render sequence in this image is in columns from top to bottom, so adjacent frames are 17 frames apart.  If there's still variation I'll try reordering the render sequence into rows to see if it makes any difference to the frequency of the problem....
Actually the images are too small for my updated wave size so I'll set up a new TGD which should also render quicker.

bigben

#4
I think the problem is specific to tgdcli. I rendered 20 frames from tgd.exe and then switched to tgdcli.exe so I could play a game while waiting ;)  All of the frames from tgd.exe were ok, but all of the frames from tgdcli.exe showed variation from each other. It looks like the code for reading the seed value didn't make it across to the CLI(?). If this is the case is there any chance of a minor update to fix this soon'ish?

I was also starting a cloud animation test (since I was rendering an animation) and got to thinking that if we had access to the wave fractal to displace it, it should  be possible to add some animation effects to water.  e.g. surface variation via translating fractal in y direction, + lateral motion by translating along x,z

Oshyan

If that is indeed the source of the issue it will hopefully be easy to fix. That would be included in the next update we release.

Although you can't directly access the fractal settings for the Water Shader itself, you can reduce its settings to 0 and feed in your own displacement (Power Fractal or whatever), or indeed just use a Reflection Shader and feed displacement into it. "Water" is really just a combination of fractal noise displacement and reflectivity with some specific tuning for the patchiness, etc.

- Oshyan