I know the image doesn't look like much, its a crop from a test I have been working on to us two heightfileds, one which is the terrain and a second which is the water which flows over it. I left the surface flat so I can see thru it, but waves can be applied via the water shader, as well as volume color.
After alot of failures, mostly because I had opacity and translucency reversed in my noggin, I finally got it to work. So, in theory, I can now move onto making a water terrain, again, of a me-dem terrain of the Anduin Vale in Middle Earth with the Anduin River and oodles of smaller rivers and streams, and then have water which flows over the terrain AND allows you to see thru the depth of it to the terrain/riverbed below.
This test is done with just a chunk from the base terrain pulled out in leveller and a quick water surface modelled in Leveller. The bigger render has some errors, I forgot to enable a few slope controlled shaders before I hit render and went to bed, so the inset shows what the banks look like.
It is hard to see, but at the bottom of the river are rocks from a fake stones clip downloaded from here, these are applied only to the base terrain, and then there is the water surface which is its own heightfield. It is not a lake object, it actually slopes 5 meters in 500 meters, while the riverbed drops 15 meters in 500 meters.
The biggest headache is making and adjusting the image masks for the merge shader.
Hopefully now I can generate a few water terrains from the 4097x4097 me-dem project Anduin Vale terrain and finally get a good river/stream network that has transperancy and depth. It will take more than the 2 terrains used here as the river will need different shaders/depth than the streams...
So, back to it.
SeerBlue