when will water look like water?

[draggoon01]

if you watch the crysis demos lighting looks awesome. with light piercing through foilage or the light ball moving through the room and causing shadows from the stair case, light feels like real light.

here's demo of water from bioshock

http://www.gametrailers.com/player.php?id=19039&type=wmv&pl=game


although it's good, water still looks fake. splashes don't look real, especially the water bursting out of the side of the pipe. the rest of the water just looks like shader operations to simulate the surface of water. or the drops of water hitting the floor look like the drops just trigger predetermined ripple animations instead of actually interacting with with the water on the floor


what will it take for water to look like water?

 

[gneGne]

I think that if we can make water look realistic, we can make everything look realistic. Anyways, it looks really good now. Except for the splashes like you mentioned.

 

[Bill Brasky]

It seems that calculating splashes, white water, and wave prorogation realistically is it pretty hard and taxing on a gpu. I see what you mean though... In the first scene of the video, all of those ripples always travel at the same speed, and they're always the same height. The splashes in the third scene look quite unnatural. I'm sure if a developer wanted to focus all their efforts into making realistic water they could, but IMO it would be wasteful to starve the rest of the environment just to have really sweet looking water.

To someone that knows more about directx than I: does dx10 have the potential to significantly increase water quality or is this mainly restricted to the amount of gpu processing power?

 

[Pugnate]

when will water look like water?

Drugs are bad... mmmmmmkay?

 

[PhatoseAlpha]

Wasn't there a news story a while back about a new technique for rending water? A re-doing of the fundamental math which was meant to be easily calculated by a computer, instead of by a person?

 

[BladeVenom]

Interesting. What the water looks like in most games is the least of my complaints. I was just looking at some Bioshock wallpaper, and round objects still don't look round.

In most game textures still look like plastic, or computerized textures. Lighting is still fake looking; no matter how shiny they try to make things, it still doesn't look realistic.

Ray tracing would help, but that would take more computational power.

 

[Sniper82]

no complaints here

 

[allies]

I think the Bioshock water looks splendid. Although I agree where it's bursting out of the pipe it doesn't look amazing - though they still have time to tweak it.

 

[T9D]

The water looks phenomonal in Bioshock. Probably the closest thing to real life in any game. And it looks to be a large leap in realism with this game. There can be some improvement sure. But it's quite impressive.

 

[MercenaryForHire]

Less yackin', more hackin'.

If you don't like the way water rendering is handled, code a way to render it realistically.

No, seriously. If you do, and can make it fairly lightweight on resources, you'll have developers breaking their arms trying to hand over cash for licensing your technology in their "next-gen" games.

- M4H

 

[evolucion8]

The water in the ATi and Crytek demo "The Project" looks incredible, far more real than Far Cry's and Half Life 2 water, the splash is not something that great but not that bad either. And it's a 2004 demo!! It runs using the SM2.0b profile which runs on the Radeon X700 or above or any SM3.0 card.

 

[QuantumPion]

Check this out: http://graphics.stanford.edu/~fedkiw/animations/glass00.avi

More here: http://graphics.stanford.edu/~fedkiw/

 

[manowar821]

Just look at where we were 10 years ago, and then just TRY to comprehend where we will be 10 years from now.

We'll get there.

 

[evolucion8]

Those graphics looks amazing!! But they are offline rendered!! In Offline rendering, there are some many possibilities finding algorithms to represent an effect, in other words, you create your own tools. But in online rendering using DirectX or OpenGL is a bit tricky, you just have to do what you want with the given tools, and make sure it runs on real time. Soon or later we'll be there.

 

[soydios]

To make water look realistic, you need to simulate it, not use animations. That takes a sh1tload of processing power.

 

[CaptainJackSwallows]

Originally posted by: gneGne
I think that if we can make water look realistic, we can make everything look realistic. Anyways, it looks really good now. Except for the splashes like you mentioned.

i think water will look realistic before fire does....fire just seems a lot harder to get looking good imo

 

[Atty]

When you go outside.

 

[GZFant]

Agreed somewhat with CaptainJack.

I honestly would rather have real water though. Not just looks but physics and calculations as well. Water is more fun of an element IMO. Although fire still needs a lot of work put into it. It still looks like 2D sprites from Duke Nukem lol..

Another opinion: No games have taken advantage of water as well as Wave Race on the Nintendo 64. That game easily made water look beautiful and gave the user a chance to react with it and against it. That was ages ago.

My 2 cents

 

[JBT]

IMO too many games have the water moving with waves etc. Most of the time water doesn't move they way they have it in games... Sure you step in it and you will create a ripple, that ripple is not doing to makes constant moving water all the time.

 

[Stoneburner]

i dont care how it looks but computer generated water tastes terrible. lacks minerals and fish turd.

 

[Vinnybcfc]

^ lol

Source engine water doesn't look too bad

 

[VERTIGGO]

that water looks ok but its way too viscous. maybe it needs to be reduced in scale. It behaves as water would look in a glass about 10 or 20 times as small as a normal glass.

 

[Modular]

I see what you are saying about the water coming from the pipe. The rest of it looks pretty good though, albeit some things are way too shiny. That was something I really didn't like about Prey; everything looked way too shiny and strange..

 

[ScrewFace]

Just take a look at the water in a game that is 9 years old: the original Unreal. Epic managed to have the best looking water for years without using hardware T&L, pixel or vertex shaders. Unreal's water looks like you could jump right in!

 

[gsellis]

Even if you get the physics right on water, you will need to be able to get radiosity in realtime to make it look right. It has to reflect, be transparent, translucent, and shape changes its properties too. All while bouncing photons from ever surface around it, through it and onto it. Maybe in DX12 or 13