water in specific locations at various angles becomes invisible when looking up from underneath

[lifeland]

I'm still fairly new to mapping, so apologies if this is an easy-to-solve problem.

Essentially, my map has a large body of water that's divided up by a large building in the middle. The building is hollow, and you can swim underneath the centermost portion of it. on the blocks towards the outside, I'm planning on having underwater entrances as well.

So far I've been able to implement this easily, but in one certain portion of the map near the underwater entrance the water turns invisible depending on your location where you're looking.

I can't for the life of me figure out why this is happening.

Example of water's surface turning invisible:

Same location, different angle:

 

[SuperLuxDeluxe]

First off, welcome! Hope you have a good time making maps.

Do you have water at different height levels in your map? The game breaks water rendering sporadically if you have water at different heights as the engine thrashes around on which to prioritize rendering.

You can only really have the surface of the water at two different heights in your map if:
1. You are using "cheap" water only. Most cheap waters are NOT translucent, but the "cheap" hydro water is, although it lacks the refraction, fog shading, and real-time reflection of regular "expensive" water.
2. You can guarantee that both levels of water will not render at the same time (they will never be in the same PVS).

By the way, a lot of mapping help ends up getting solved quicker in our Discord server under the mapping-help channel. Most of the people in our community are there most often, so that's where it'll get the most eyes.

 

[lifeland]

thank you for the advice. I do have the water at two different heights, but the only one that has a height difference has it's surface inside a floor.

I would like to ask for a little clarification, first and foremost: am I correct in assuming that the "different heights" penalty only applies to the surface of the water?

If so, it's likely that my water's surface is being rendered at certain angles through the floor of my room. I may be able to at least try and prevent this by making the walls of the room slightly thicker.

I'll post about how that goes later.

 

[SuperLuxDeluxe]

Yeah only the surface matters

 

[lifeland]

Ah-ha! I've found the exact cause of the problem!

For some reason, my underwater door causes the room it leads into to not render until you pass through it and out of the water. However, the surface of water at a different height is still shown! thus, whenever said surface of water is visible through the doorway, the glitch occurs. this is why the position and angle it occurred seemed to be random.

To fix this, I should either find a way to make the inside of the room to render properly (likely not going to be an easy task) or find a way to make the different-height surface not render at all while still behaving like water.