Animated Water?

[Oshyan]

As Jo mentioned, these are things we have been thinking about, and wanting to do, for a long time. Martin is right about limited resources, though not correct about everyone being part-time. Jo works full-time while Matt does some film industry work with TG (as mentioned) but that work also very directly contributes to TG's development; quite a few great features have been developed directly as a result of that work and we're proud of our close working relationship with a number of prominent effects studios.

That being said, yes resources and time remain challenges and we're continually looking at the feasibility of various solutions to address that. Taking on interns as just one example is interesting (and something we have of course considered), but that requires resources to manage too, and paradoxically it can be almost as time-consuming to oversee someone else doing that work as to do it oneself.

In any case I don't mean to just make a bunch of excuses. Ultimately I just want you to know that we of course continually consider a wide range of possible solutions, and while there may seem to be obvious ways to fix some particular lack, there are reasons why things like this aren't done. They're not always the most satisfying reasons (i.e. lack of resources), but they are the reality we have to deal with. You can trust that there is no one who wants to solve these issues more than us, our livelihood depends on it.

On the bright side, we're actively working on these things and I think you'll see some things you'll like in the relatively near future.

- Oshyan

[PabloMack]

You can animate it yourself with a transform shader, moving X Y or Z, depending on what you need. If you move the Y for instance, you change the fractal and it looks like it's 'static wave movement'. Move the X or Z as well and you have a river movement. Move 2 or 3 opposite or crossed, and you might make an ocean movement. Lots to explore there.

I have placed a Transform Input Shader between the Water Shader and Lake. A Y velocity of 5mps (along with 2.5mps X) seems to create a believable amount of agitation. Now my problem is that I need to damp wave height in shallow water. I have clamped the difference between the terrain Y and lake level and input that to the Transform Input Shader's density function and that doesn't solve the problem. What I need is an input into the Lake Water Shader that scales the overall wave height and the necessary input doesn't seem to be there. The water at the edge of the lake acts just like it does in the middle of the lake and that shouldn't be so:

http://youtu.be/96tMzGnMuCQ

[Dune]

Interesting problem... let me think... I'm going theoretical now; if you use the water shader for waves only (no transp and no refl.) you could have it as an input to a surface shader. Mask the surface shader by a height restriction (to have only shallow water influenced), then tick the smoothing and set a valuw of maybe 0.5. That would reduce the wavelets in your water shader (input) by half in shallow water. Now feed this through another water shader, without waves and you're done. Theory!