Underwater effect

Doktor

L1: Registered
Jan 9, 2010
18
1
I am currently working on a map that is underwater/ submarine themed and I am using the bulletcrops pack for the models and textures.

I am having some problems though getting the correct look of it being really underwater. I tried different lighting options but nothing seems to give me a good effect. here is what it does look like:

http://i.imgur.com/ya9WA.jpg

Also, there are a few other problems. One of them is on my control point. on the arch there are black spots that seem to not go away, no matter what I do:

http://i.imgur.com/7pisH.jpg

the last thing is, light entities like "light_spots" and a lot of other entities like "env_spark" are not visivle through the animated glass texture, is there a way to fix this? (it is the bulletcrops animated glass texture as seen in the above screenshots)
 
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grazr

Old Man Mutant Ninja Turtle
aa
Mar 4, 2008
5,441
3,814
Uuuuurgh, that image host is despicable. Use dropbox or photobucket or atleast imageshack.

The compression artifacts on your images also make it impossible to see what is happening in your screenshots. Save with a better quality.
 

tyler

aa
Sep 11, 2013
5,102
4,621
First of all, in the future, you're better off using an image host like Imgur or Dropbox. The quality will be better and it'll be easier for us to see them. And don't use Print Screen, either. Open your console and type bind F5 jpeg to take screenshots as jpgs normally.

Anyway, your black spots look to me like some kind of possibly invalid brush or some other similar error. In Hammer hit Alt + P and see what that brings up. You can try remaking those brushes from scratch or fixing them. It could also be as simple as lighting -- what lighting are you compiling with? Fast, full, final?

As far as an underwater look goes, I don't really know what you mean entirely. It looks pretty underwater to me. Unless you mean you want the spots on the floor that light passing through water makes? You're better off doing it some way other than with lights and plain water, like a scrolling overlay or something.
 
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TMP

Ancient Pyro Main
aa
Aug 11, 2008
947
560
First off, looks quite nice. Nice usage of bulletcrops.

The underwater effect is done by using material proxies, guaranteed. I'm not very familiar with them, Here is a guide to get you more familiar with them and their capabilities.

You can probably edit the underwater appearance texture to make it feel more natural, but I don't think it looks bad.

I'm not noticing the black spots that you are referring to, but I may just be assuming it is something like a prop issue, in which case, you can either disable prop shadows or do a vertex based lighting compile (I'll grab a link later for the compile options).

For the last one, I'm not sure if it is possible.
 

Penguin

Clinically Diagnosed with Small Mapper's Syndrome
aa
May 21, 2009
2,039
1,484
please use a less obnoxious imagehost.
 

Doktor

L1: Registered
Jan 9, 2010
18
1
I am sorry for the image host, I changed them.

what I would need to do is add some kind of fog to the outside so the cliffs on the end are fairly visible. when I would add the fog though, it would be in the inside of the map as well and that bothers me. is there a way to add fog only to the "outside" water part?
 

surgeon

L1: Registered
Apr 5, 2010
17
15
It shouldn't look wavy through the glass because you'd only have ripples like that on the surface. You could use blue lighting/glass, or other effects like bubbles or caustics instead.


As for fog, a trick I used in another map is to create a flat texture, about 64x64 and 15% opacity. Make maybe 3 layers of func_brushes with shadows disabled and stack them behind the windows. The 'steps' might be a bit obvious but you could adjust the opacity/distance between the brushes to smooth it out.
 

grazr

Old Man Mutant Ninja Turtle
aa
Mar 4, 2008
5,441
3,814
What it looks like to me is that you haven't used func_detail's (appropriately/at all) and the black spots are the results of over complicated vis-leaf's resulting in missing texture/lighting faces depending on which vis-leaf you view the faces from.

Simplfiy your world geometry using solid entities (which will inadvertantly decrease compile times and improve ingame performance), which should also in turn improve rendering of actual visible world geometry.
 
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Pocket

Half a Lambert is better than one.
aa
Nov 14, 2009
4,694
2,579
You're currently using effects/water_warp for the ripples, right? That actually looks better than most attempts at using that texture. But if someone here knows of a way to get a better underwater effect, I'd like to know too. I know it's nowhere near accurate compared to the real effect that occurs when players are underwater.

I can tell you this much, though. Adding a 3D skybox and flooding it with water does not work. I've tried that one already, just out of curiosity.