UPLOADED: High Resolution Water Colors

Clearly you've just pasted CFS3 window graphics over a photograph of a MiG flying low over a lake!:biggrin-new: That looks incredible! The clouds look like they extend farther too. This is really impressive.
 
You can use the new high rez color file for the water, but without AnKor's shaders it won't look anything like what's shown in the images above.

AnKor's Shaders switched Off versus On

mDyuNIN.jpg
 
MajorMagee said:
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.
Click to expand...

Aren't the textures in the shader set 100% standard MAW, though? Exactly the same normal and alpha channels. Which also explains why I never saw a difference as my CFS3 had MAW water to begin with... the recent switch to ETO water, on the other hand, changed things very noticably.
 
You may well be right. Over the years I've made so many mods and tweaks so I'm not always sure of any given file's original source.

I just looked at my MAW install and the copies I have of what I thought were the original water animation files I have archived are 256 x 256, colored blue, and the animation runs north to south. (Makes me wonder where these actually came from if they're not the original MAW files...)

The ones provided with the shader pack (evidently borrowed from MAW) are 512 x 512, are in shades of grey, and run East to West.

I do remember in the early work with AnKor that the color of the wave animation files was determined to be irrelevant because they were only being used for the bump mapping and sea foam threshold, so we went with shades of grey only.

However, the color of cfs3h2o.dds did have an effect when combined with panoramic_cubic_test.dds that was used for the surface reflections at the time.

More recently the surface reflection colors are taken directly from the environment dynamically rather than using the static image so the panoramic file no longer plays a role in this, but the underlying color of the water in cfs3h2o still does as seen in Gecko's work.
 
In looking at the images at the top of this thread again, the animation files are probably darker so they don't meet the threshold for the seafoam effect to be triggered. This can be adjusted in SeaWater.fx using a different value in #define FoamAmount 0.32.

The more watery look is probably because the alpha channel pattern shapes have less directionality.

You can also adjust the values for WaveBump and WaveScale in SeaWater.fx in combination with the <WaterDetailTextureSize val="5"/> value in ConfigOverrides.xml to adjust the wave, and surface ripple heights to give it a more or less dynamic fluid look.

For those earlier shader packs I worked on my bias was toward calmer looking seas, but the beauty of AnKor's work is that all of this is easy to customize to get the exact look you want.
 
MajorMagee said:
I just looked at my MAW install and the copies I have of what I thought were the original water animation files I have archived are 256 x 256, colored blue, and the animation runs north to south. (Makes me wonder where these actually came from if they're not the original MAW files...)
Click to expand...

No idea but just for the sake of science I installed a new copy of MAW into a machine that doesn't even have the stock CFS3 folder to copy things from, and surely enough there's no cfs3.exe to confirm it but the water textures do exist and they're 512x512 full grey with east to west animation. Every other add-on with the exception of ETO - PTO both versions and BoB, that is - seems to use the MAW texture, with BoB having the contrast increased. ETO has a completely different set in 256x256 and I bet it would look staggeringly good in higher resolution so if someone knows who made it, we really could use a modernized version.
 
I just checked and I can easily increase the resolution from 256x256 to 1024x1024 with GigapixelAI.

Since my installs are no longer using the default ETO files, what am I looking for, the N to S blue ones with white caps?
 
The ones I am using do show foam, I am just using settings that don't display it for a calmer look. I change them when I want to go flying in a storm.

BTW, the first portion of the SeaWater.fx has several wave size settings defined. If you create a .txt file called State.txt in your effects/fxtextures folder, and type the name of the size setting you want as the first and only line of the file, you can easily switch between different wave sizes between sessions. For example, to use the Sea_Light setting, type Light as the first line of State.txt and save it, the Sea_Light settings will be used. If no State.txt file is found in effects/fxtextures, then the default settings will be used.

However, based on Ankor's screenshot, it seems we can look forward to this discussion of wave textures becoming a thing of the past and even better looking waves at some point in the future.:jump:
 
Thanks, I did not know about the State.txt file functionality, and always wondered about how to access the other values in SeaWater.fx.
 
I gave the 1024x1024 animation file idea a try:


  1. They don't end up looking all that different from the lower rez ones in game.
  2. I would occasionally crash to desktop, from what I assume was a memory issue.

In looking at what I believe are the original ETO animation files they don't appear to have much directionality to their motion. It looks more like random chop than wave trains.

The water animation files provided with AnKor's shaders (that originated with MAW) give a nice appearance of moving across the surface of the sea with the wind.
 
Very interesting developments. Ankor is really up to something. Thanks gecko ! Really nice upgrade for the ETO. Regards,Scott
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top