[SOLVED] Water surface beaufort aspect

[Amerio.Stephane]

Hello,

I'm actually trying to solve the tiling pattern visibility of water that appears from an altitude above 200m. While water_global_base.basemat tiling is rather invisible, it's not the case with  water_global_beaufort_3.mat and up, and it's just plain ugly from beaufort 5 and up (I mean, as seen from an altitude; from the ground level, all beaufort are very nice).

I tried playing with the water surface LOD settings, but it looks like it's not affected (except for Min vis != -inf, which leads to a completely disappearing water).

Thanks for your help.

[morbid]

Hello,

at first I'd like to recommend you to check water and environment settings in oil platform demo. Is it that bad as you describe?

In most cases you can set haze parameter for storm conditions, so you wouldn't see water surface. I guess in real storm you also wouldn't see it :)

But tiling is an issue. Haven't you checked UV parameters in water global material? You can configure it for higher altitudes.

If you need additional help with this I can consult with our artist team.

[Amerio.Stephane]

Hi,

Yes, I indeed used the oil platform demo for testing, as I suspected you may have customized a lot of settings. But the tiling is still very visible. From the water level, the visual quality is very nice indeed. But if you gain some altitude, then it just doesn't look good :( You can try to "hide" it with haze and this would be a valid tactic in northern sea for example, where high winds mean a stormy weather with a short visibility. But here in south of France, we have very high winds with a very clear weather. So it's very likely we'll fly over a Beaufort 6-8 sea with a visibility distance of 50km or more, and an altitude above 200m upto 2000m.

Maybe your artists can help me tweak the settings (with a continuous fading), or maybe there is room for improvements for the next version ;)

Thanks.

[morbid]

Thank you for detailed explanation!

I'll post a request for changes in water global material. 

Probably it is possible to tweak the settings but I'm afraid that water global wasn't designed for such use case.

[morbid]

Hello Stephane,

we did some changes considering tiling issue. On the attached screenshot you can see WaterGlobal object viewed from altitude of 1500 meters (on the top) and 500 meters.
Visibility distance is set to 120km, used beaufort 6 material.

[Amerio.Stephane]

This is looking so much better now ! Thanks a lot for the update :)