Hi All
As mentioned in another post I'm revisiting my river/lake model with the latest version
Terrain -> Masked opacity of default shader -> water shader
http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=1301.msg12986This doesn't work anymore as the water shader appears across the entire terrain, poking out through the overlying surfacing.
[attachthumb=#1]
http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=1636.0This approach is the one I'm testing at the moment. The main problem with this at the moment is that at some camera angles there are triangular gaps in the river surface. I'm investigating the cause of these to see if I can find a workaround. My current suspicions are with the colour adjust node used to adjust the extent of the river surface. Dropping the white level to really small values (making the mask area wider... and sharper) seems to be a part of the problem. I had also suspected image resolution may play a part as I was really pushing the limits of resolution, but I don't think this is to blame.
[attachthumb=#2]
Here's a partial render showing the river layer rendering before the terrain. As you can see the drop off at the edge of the river is very severe, and this combined with the contrast of the edge of the river appear to be causing the problem.
[attachthumb=#3]
I ran a series of renders using different white level values for the river mask (1, 0.75, 0.5, 0.25, 0.1, 0.05, 0.01)
[attachthumb=#4]
You can see how the width of the river surface is affected by this change, casting a shadow in the river bed when it doesn't extend beyond the river bank. No glitches at this camera angle. Repeating at a lower camera angle today. PS, the water transparency makes this approach very worth while... there's a lot of potential here.