waterfall

[Goms]

good evening,

after a second try with a somehow realistic waterfall, i think i need some help at one point (and maybe someone has a better idea then me ).
I create a waterfall with a mostly functional terrain and a painted shader with 3D-setting. With this "lazy" way its not hard to get a cloud at the right position and shape. But the structure, a power fractal that has the painted shader as input, isn't working so far.
Heres a image of the Waterfall; just ignore the terrain and surface.



I would need something to form the power fractal with the terrain shape in a way that stretches the fractal with the shape of the "step".
Anyone a good idea?

[dandelO]

You could try my method... http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=5118.0

The water is actually just the waterfall terrain, duplicated and slightly scaled up, then skinned with water shaders instead of rocks. Worked for me.

[Goms]

This is what i wanted to do later; its easy to get the water in the right shape because the basis for my terrain are some functions.
For now i wanted to get something that has the structure of water falling a longer time.
it should look like this: http://www.burnie.net/html/images/waterfall_large.jpg
My problem is, that the warp shader does not bring the right result.

[dandelO]

Ahh, then I'd suggest applying another fractal with stretched noise along the axis the water is travelling. Apply this to another surface layer over the main waterfall body.

You might need to base your scene directly side or front-on for this, I haven't been able to stretch noise diagonaly. Build the waterfall around the scene where your camera faces directly along the x or z.

The warp shader doesn't work to this effect, I don't think.

[Mohawk20]

Yes, I think stretching the noise by 5 or 10 in the y direction would improve this. Maybe you want to apply a reflective shader to the painted area of the cliff side as well to get some wet reflections that would enhance the water simulation.

[Goms]

I tried to use 3 power fractals once. It worked so far, but then there is a hard cutoff between these fractals and the clouds seem not to be moving with the slope.
A redirect shader with a Power fractal that displaces along "lateral normalized" could help to get the power fractal stretched in the right way, but also moves my painted shader away from the "cliffs". Maybe there is any way to get only the colors from this power fractal?

@Mohawk20: I want to simply model something out of a plane and the watershader to get something that's reflecting.

[dandelO]

Maybe there is any way to get only the colors from this power fractal?

Just unchecking 'apply displacement' should do this, or, setting the fractal to only the 'colour function' of a default shader/surface layer.

Clouds are hard to control as water with fractals, I find. I've tried this with adding foam, using the same fractal as the wave displacement with a little negative colour offset to avoid complete coverage, laid across the water as a cloud layer(similar to Mhaze's 'clouds follow terrain' method...http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=5307.msg54770#msg54770). Nothing I've tried makes the same fractal work the same way for both the clouds and water, always there are discrepancies in where the undisplaced fractal colour function(in the cloud density shader) is appearing. I'm working on this, volumetric 'foam' is possible, I know it, just not yet...