UPLOADED: High Resolution Water Colors

gecko

gecko

Charter Member
I've been sitting on this unfinished project for most of the last decade - finally decided I needed to get it finished. It took so long because the water colors in CFS3 are defined by a single 512x512 texture that covers the entire map. I decided it would be much better if it were higher resolution, so I went with the largest texture my system could handle creating with so many layers: 4096x4096. With no well defined shorelines on the original texture, I pretty much had to guess, sometimes pixel by pixel where to put shorelines, blend estuaries, etc. Just recently I received a massive boost by a guy who wants to be known only as Ed, who hung out over at the WOTR forums and had created some maps of the shorelines. This no doubt literally saved me years of work and probably made the difference for me finishing it at all. I finished in a couple of days.

So here it is once the Admins see it: http://www.sim-outhouse.com/sohforum...ord=europe.zip

It is compatible with any CFS3 install using the stock CFS3 map, so use it with stock CFS3, ETO, Clive's BoB, or any other Europe install you have. It will also work with WOTR and WOFF.

Have fun exploring the various bodies of water and seeing much more variety and detail than with the stock "blue tarp" water. Naturally it looks a million times better if you are using Ankor's shaders. While I recommend using the 4096x4096 version, I did include lower resolution versions if your system gets bogged down by large textures.

Here's a few of the newly recolored locations:

Bodensee (Lake Constance)
1fIvcal.jpg


Adriatic Sea
FsrCxuh.jpg


Frisian Islands
03NEXtW.jpg


Gironde Estuary
z5VKmiR.jpg


Goodwin Sands
ySfJPUZ.jpg


Strangford Lough
OBjjDfi.jpg
 
Looks fantastic!

I wonder if using GigapixelAI for the initial enlargement would have been a helpful starting point?

I remember working on enlarging the in-game 1876 x 1844 map in MAW for the H2S project to 7054 x 7376 and there were location shifts for the various islands and coastlines that I never did get completely ironed out, so perhaps not.
 
The stock texture was not nearly detailed enough even if it were enlarged. After I was provided with an 8192x8192 map of most of the shorelines things fell into place quite quickly! If your machine is up to it, you could enlarge this one to 8192x8192 and add additional detail though. If you're interested I'll send you my .pdn file with all the layers. 8192 was the resolution I was hoping to paint it in, but it proved to be impossible to work with a layered image that large on my system.
 
Thanks for this! Fascinating to the this complicated texture sheet in mirror-image. Can't wait to give it a try :running:
 
That was an easy install. Running with the 2048 on my laptop and its a big improvement. Love seeing anything that adds variation to the scenery :encouragement:
 
High res Water colors

Greetings all and have a great 2020,these new water colors do really make a difference,i`m using the 4096 potion and it works well for my rig.
Well done Gecko old son you`ve done it again.

alcanallen.
 
Looks excellent, and no noticable performance hit even with the 4096 texture on a Core2Duo (yes you read that right...) machine. :encouragement:

I could certainly use the rest of the magic applied to your water too, though! Is that all just shaders and certain settings or is there some other texture trickery at play? It looks a lot more "watery" than what I have.
 
The shaders are a huge part of it, but I'm assuming you've got those? Might be the wave textures? H2od_01.dds through H2od_16.dds. I think mine are the ones from WOFF. I go back and forth between those and the ETO ones, both are quite good IMO. Yeah, I was quite surprised that I didn't have a performance hit either when I went to the 4096 texture, not sure why that is, but I'll take it!
 
Very nice.

In this case 4K texture shouldn't have performance impact unless you are really low on GPU memory. It is stretched over a huge area and GPU only needs to access a rather small and localized part of the texture currently in view; and the view doesn't change much from frame to frame. This is the perfect scenario for GPU.

By the way, I've just learned that checking "Disable Water Reflection" in cfs3config actually disables cfs3h2o texture and will make water white-ish. I didn't know it is related.

gecko, I see the texture doesn't have alpha channel, which is correct - it saves 25% of memory, but please keep your image sources, maybe I'll find a way to do something useful with inland colors or alpha values :)
 
Ooh, I like the sound of that! Don't worry, I NEVER get rid of source files! Something like wave size based on location using an alpha channel or something like that? At any rate, I'm eager to put my files to any further use you might find for them!
 
gecko said:
Might be the wave textures? H2od_01.dds through H2od_16.dds.
Click to expand...

This was indeed the reason, combined with some experimenting with the shader values for the waves. Yours still look more random and three dimensional but it might be just the pictures, it looks very different in motion compared to a stationary shot.

The wave textures made me think though. Since they're originally there to give an illustration of moving waves on a flat surface, and we now have a surface that actually has the shape of wavy water, I wonder if they could be done away with completely and the shaders would take care of the entire thing. My previous textures were from a time before the shaders and they looked good then but were horribly mismatched with the new wave shapes now, I'll have to look into it more.
 
As I understand it, the wave shape is actually created by the textures. Instead of texturing the water, they are used as bump maps to give the appearance of waves, even though the surface is actually still flat. That said, some textures respond to this better than others and look unnatural. The values at the start of SeaWater.fx can be tweaked to suit different sets of textures better, but some may just look bad no matter what.
 
I spent a fair amount of time finding a balance between the animation textures, and the seawater.fx threshold levels. Too high and it starts to look like sea ice; too low and you don't see anything. The real pain was finding a set of textures that made the foam appear in somewhat random patterns rather than obvious lines. It turns out from looking at real examples of sea foam patterns they often do line in up in rows because of the wave frequency driven by steady winds.

nMPQ1eE.jpg
 
I don't even remember what I did to turn water textures into bump-mapped waves. I think it mostly depends on alpha channel of h2od textures but maybe color also.
There are also certain conditions which add white foam to waves, again i don't remember how exactly it works. MajorMagee did some tweaks for older versions of shaders, but I believe his tweaks should be present in the latest version as well.

Anyway, I plan to move away from h2od textures completely and replace water with a "procedural" one (based on formulas and abstract "noise" texture).
Something like the attached image (DX11 work in progress, this specific wave shape doesn't fit ocean much, but looks ok for a river or lake - and that's where alpha channel in cfs3h2o may come in handy).
 

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