Light and water question

ndicki

ndicki

Charter Member 2016
Before I unthinkingly deleted it when I installed RS, I had a tweaked Solomons install where I'd done something - or more probably, added something experimental someone else from the Rats had done - which gave the water a far greater reflection ratio, and which made the sky brighter and more 'silvery', if you see what I mean. No idea what it was or where it came from, but I suspect it was by fiddling simultaneously with the water dds files - I know where they are! - and the other xml files that govern light reflections. I can't for the life of me remember what they're called or where to find them...
 
Sounds quite interesting Nigel. All the .dds files in question are located in the effects/fxtextures folder. How you have the shaders.xml tweaked determines how they are used. The files are all the ones beginning with "cfs3h2" (should be four of them) and all "h2od_xx" files - you should have 16 of them. After that, the shaders.xml controls how they are rendered, and the suneffect.xml determines how bright the ambient lighting is. Depending on how your shaders.xml is set up, weather files can also change the appearance of the water. This is controlled in the "fogColor" value in the different weather.xml files in the weather folder - note, these are not the cloud .xmls in the clouds subfolder. The fog color changes the color of the haze on the horizon, and in certain shaders configurations can also tint the water color so you can have bright or stormy looking water depending on the weather.
 
Hi Daniel - it's coming along, anyway! I've made up my own h2od_XX files by overpainting the ones from MAW, which incidentally are the same as the ones from RS anway. I've kept the alpha channel but painted over the visible part. Then I've done a modified cfs3h2o.dds to give the water a more turquoise hue. What I really want here, and I expect enough people have tried, is the nice two-tone tropical water effects you get in CFS2. I don't think CFS3 does this...

Meanwhile I've been looking through my collection of suneffect.xmls - remembered! - but not one is quite right. I've got one which gives the luminosity I want, but the clouds are shuttering and appearing intermittently, so that's no good.

The final thing is while this may be realistic enough, I want the 'fog' effect to set in further away... That sounds like weather. Off to see what I can pillage from other sources!

Can't remember how these numbers work - fogColor="4288529397"

Any idea?
 
Good find! I'd forgotten that one - though I suspect it's the one I have from OFF v2...
 
Converted to hex that's FF 9D C3 F5. Since CFS3 often writes these backwards from PhotoShop it's perhaps something like light peach with a clear Alpha layer (dusty sunset fog)?
 
ndicki said:
Hi Daniel - it's coming along, anyway! I've made up my own h2od_XX files by overpainting the ones from MAW, which incidentally are the same as the ones from RS anway. I've kept the alpha channel but painted over the visible part. Then I've done a modified cfs3h2o.dds to give the water a more turquoise hue. What I really want here, and I expect enough people have tried, is the nice two-tone tropical water effects you get in CFS2. I don't think CFS3 does this...

Meanwhile I've been looking through my collection of suneffect.xmls - remembered! - but not one is quite right. I've got one which gives the luminosity I want, but the clouds are shuttering and appearing intermittently, so that's no good.

The final thing is while this may be realistic enough, I want the 'fog' effect to set in further away... That sounds like weather. Off to see what I can pillage from other sources!

Can't remember how these numbers work - fogColor="4288529397"

Any idea?
Click to expand...

Hi Nigel

h2od_XX files are the water animation textures. When you have water animation turned on, cfs3 cycles through those 16 textures to make the water look like it's moving. What you're going for is possible though, I've done it. The water must be made semi transparent via the shaders xml and the cfs3h2of.dds given a semi transparent alpha. This allows the underlying terrain landclass to be visible and if it is painted correctly it can give you the effect you're looking for. This way water color can be changed based on geographical location, so rivers can look different from the ocean, the Channel can look different than the the Med, deep water can look different from shallow water, etc. The thing is, the current landclass layout is not set up for this in any map but MAW. New water-only landclasses need to be created and placed in the map for this to work. I want to do this one day, but it will be a long time before I can tackle it. Meanwhile if anyone else wants to give it a go, I'd be glad to help them get the water set up for it.

Your suneffect issue sounds more like a shaders issue to me, but I'm not sure.

Tom explained the fogcolor value to me here: http://www.sim-outhouse.com/sohforums/showthread.php?71646-10-Digit-Color-Value

I never did get the fog distance figured out though. I am fairly certain it has something to do with the alpha value in the fogcolor.
 
This is getting complicated...

Meanwhile, I added your value 16711680 for red fog to the DR Cirrus 2 cloud file, and it didn't change a thing...
 
I think you've got it about right actually, you just need to tweak the transparency (a little less transparent I think) and color and you've got it. Make sure when you mess with the fog color that you tweak the value in the BackgroundWeather section of the xml.

You'll notice in your pics that the texture in the water is the same as the land, just with your water textures over top of it, hence the need for separate water landclasses to take full advantage of how the sim is rendering the water.
 
Not too sure how I got here, but I changed the colour and alpha of all the h2od_xx files, in any case. The thing is, there is now no movement or reflection in the water despite my exaggerating the contrast of the alpha layers in the files...

Shot01-27-13-12-25-30.jpg


Shot01-27-13-12-25-52.jpg
 
I think they started life as the ones from MAW, but have been modified with a custom curve in Photoshop to boost the mid tone contrast.

View attachment 79827

I also smoothed out the noise in the Alpha layer (2 pixel Gaussian blur), but left it as it was in the other layers to retain the look of having surface ripples overlaying the waves. The water detail texture size is set to 6 in the configuration tool.
 
If you'd like to stick them in the mail...? They look just the way I was trying to achieve!
 
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