Water decal limitations

[Amerio.Stephane]

Hi,

I'm struggling with water decal to simulate some real world fx:

1. heavy oil leaks around a boat, blackening the sea
2. sea local temperature change visible in IR

For 1/, I tried to use water decals, but the decal color can only lighten the sea color. How could I turn it really dark locally?

For 2/, I tried using decals too with post_sensor, but water decal don't support Aux buffer. Why such a limitation?

I guess for 2/ I could use the albedo channel instead of aux, but again 1/ would be limiting me to hot local water (white) when I need cold local water (black).

Thanks!

[silent]

Hi Stephane,

Yes, WaterDecal material is quite heavy and some of the features were cut off from it to prevent even further performance issues.

For #1 there is a research require on how to add multiple blending modes to the existing material (that more likely will result in rewriting the half of the material itself).

For #2 I can't say atm how hard would it be to implement this, but in the current code base aux pass is force-skipped from water decals (and I think that's due to some serious reason).

The long story short: yes these limitations are exists and we can't quickly remove them. I will create research tickets regarding this for future SDK updates (2.17 and up).

If that's quite urgent thing I would recommend to contact Elizaveta directly and discuss a possibility for custom per project solution.

Thanks!

[Amerio.Stephane]

Hi silent, I understand there are currently some strong limitations. But I can insist that we'll need soon (early next year) these features (black oil on sea, and thermal sensor for sea, with visible back wakes over gray sea). I think 2.17 is a correct time frame. Thanks for pushing this!

Stephane

[silent]

If you could send us some good thermal references for water (in PM), especially with "visible back wakes over gray sea" - that would help a lot to understand what we can do and when.