Animated Water Caustics FX discovered in Unreal

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Silver_Ibex

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Feb 27, 2001
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I decided while waiting around for the UT GFX patch update, I would see what tricks I could pull with just the regular old engine, I dug around some more and found that old Unreal has a built in ability to do cast animated Water Caustics FX on surfaces below liquid surfaces, though I doubt even the programmer realized this potentiality at the time the engine was coded.

The result looks like an animated UT2k4 projected texture FX, but this is with the old unreal/UT99, without any new code added.

The attached pic does not do the FX justice, it looks much better in full motion, now I just need to put together a quick example map to show off this new trick in all its glory :D
 

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War_Master

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May 27, 2005
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That looks awesome. I hope you can pull it off the way you expect.

I'm betting it will not kill framerate as bad as the LightEffects... or will it?


Btw, can you guys get the BumpMap feature to work?
 
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GreatEmerald

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Jan 20, 2008
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WateryShimmer... Well, I like the light effect more than the DM-Curse3/4's projectors, looks more natural to me. But if this goes even more natural, then good.
 

Silver_Ibex

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Tests so far have shown the FPS cost is not noticeably more then other regular liquid textures :)

The one drawback to it that I can see is it does not cast onto pickup items and characters.
 

War_Master

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Silver_Ibex, can you tell us step by step what you did to pull that effect?

I think I might be able to do a close bumpmap effect that way.
 

Silver_Ibex

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Give me a week, I have a small indoor map that has been sitting on my hard drive for over a year, and I am now going to use this FX as a motivating reason to finally finish the map and get it released :D

Yeh so expect something around next weekend.
 

dinwitty

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Tests so far have shown the FPS cost is not noticeably more then other regular liquid textures :)

The one drawback to it that I can see is it does not cast onto pickup items and characters.

If you had a P160-200 when the game was released you would have had an fps hit. Like the shadows, a lot of cool stuff was turned off, but practically not removed, maybe a little coding it woiuld be back.

nice find.
 

Silver_Ibex

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Feb 27, 2001
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Weekend release of the playable Demo map :D

Download here

The pickups are setup for use with Serpentine.

Bot paths have problems with the moving crates, so best used for multiplayer.

Not sure how bad the movers will affect lag, so some feedback on how it plays online would be appreciated.

see attached Water pics above and below surface, and hallway pic.
 

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leilei

ANIME ELF'S !!
Jan 20, 2008
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If you had a P160-200 when the game was released you would have had an fps hit. Like the shadows

Shadows are more vertices to process. Multitexture effects such as this (which a Voodoo2 could do with ease) shouldn't be a problem.
Also those shadow effects were only available for the PowerVR PCX2 chipset since it had a 24-bit stencil buffer.
 
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Turboman

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Smart idea of using a macrotexture/detailtexture to create the caustic effects, i've thought of this before but only recently discovered procedural textures could contain multiple "layers" much like combiners do :)

Very nice work, i hope to see more mappers incorporate this :tup::tup::tup:
 

Silver_Ibex

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For those still having trouble sorting out how this FX can be reproduced

In Ued texture browser look in the map mylevel texture pack, and open the properties of the “SidewalkDrain” texture by right clicking on it and choosing “properties” .

A window will pop up showing the texture and to its right a menu with a bunch of properties click on the bottom one that says “Texture” and it will expand down to show a list.

On this list you will see the “Macrotexture” option is set to WetTexture'MyLevel.CausticL'.

This tells the engine that we want to overlay that WetTexture on top of this drain texture, combining them together.

That’s all there is to the trick, use “Macrotexture” to mix the two textures together

Now to make your own,

Step A: make your first texture a 256x256 Caustic texture
To make the Caustic texture I used Caustics Generator v1.4
With the background RGB colors all set to =128, so it is gray.

You can read more about Caustics Generator, and download here
http://www.lysator.liu.se/~kand/caustics/

Step B: import this texture into Ued, I used the Mylevel package.

Step C: now for the second texture, in the texture browser under file select “New”, a window will pop up “New Texture”, fill out the needed info, and under the “class:” option select “Wet Texture”. See first attached pic below.
This will pop up a Texture Properties window with a blank texture, you can now go back to the texture browser and find the first texture you imported and select it.
Then return to the Texture Properties window of your Wet Texture, and look under its properties, click on the bottom one that says “WaterPaint” and it will expand down to show a list, look down this list to where it says “Source Texture” and click it.
Buttons will then pop up, just press the one that says “Use”. It should now have set the choice to your first imported texture.

If not go back to the browser and make sure you have your first texture selected, a try setting “Source Texture” option again.
When it is set, you can then have fun playing with painting drops on the canvas of your “Wet Texture”. When you have added a few ripples you are ready for the next step.

Step D: import a new third texture, this will be a surface that we want the caustics to shine on, in my map I called it “SidewalkDrain”.
Open the properties of this third texture, “SidewalkDrain” by right clicking on it and choosing “properties”.

A window will pop up showing the texture and to its right a menu with a bunch of properties click on the bottom one that says “Texture” and it will expand down to show a list.
On this list you will see the “Macrotexture” option, we need to set this to use our “Wet Textur” we just made in step C.

So go back to the texture browser and make sure our second texture “Wet Texture” is selected, then return to the properties window and click on the “Macrotexture” option and press the “use” button.
It should now have set the “Macrotexture” choice to use the Second texture.
If not go back to the browser and make sure you have your Second texture selected, a try setting “Macrotexture” again.

This third texture is now ready for use in your map.
See attached pic below illustrating the steps of the process.
 

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Silver_Ibex

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Feb 27, 2001
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Since it is demonstrating a texture trick, and not brushwork, I left the brushes out to keep file size down as small as possible ;)