Friday, March 14, 2008

Water


I'm not technically sure it's alright to be posting non-IT409 related things here, but I'm going to brashly go ahead anyways.

I've been working terrain rendering in XNA for months now as a side project. I've gone from really bad implementations using patches and quadtrees to the most cutting edge techniques my hardware supports. (IE, Vertex Texture Fetch in Shader Model 3.0)

I'm trying to implement a water model to go with it, so in addition to cheaply textured mountains and valleys I can have poorly textured water. I just got the first 'visually interesting' iteration done. It is on it's way to a lot of improvements, but you test as you go.

The image shows the current progress. I'm unhappy with the transparency effect right now, the visibility should fall off the further you look through the water, and right now it doesn't depend on that at all. I know how to fix it, requiring a look up of the depth values, but I need to see if I can get that data directly, or if I need to render the depth values to a texture to get the information. I'll figure it out.

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