Dev Update #19: Blocky Waterfalls?

Dev Update #19: Blocky Waterfalls?

Heyo!

Today’s update is more a question rather than a proper update.

I’ve been working on the water implementation to make it less… Crazy noisy. Right now it just takes the shape of the original land tile; you could end up with crazy heights in certain locations of a lake, which looked quite cool but also quite odd.

So I attempted to make the water more level so that there could be waterfalls and stuff.

However, it doesn’t look quite there yet… This is what I came up with:

waterfall_test_base

The water is level in some areas, with a straight fall downwards. Which isn’t bad, but looks odd specially in places like the left side fall. Some of this could be fixed with some particles and effects, like my sketch below:

waterfall_test

With some good particle work, I’m sure it could work but… Hmm… It feels too blocky. Since the terrain is less “voxel” and more “low-poly”, the procedural water mesh would need a lot of work to make it work consistently in this.

However, as I write this post, a potential solution came to me. I could simply make the water default to the base water level (or lower, if the terrain goes below base water level), and then add specialized waterworks tool, so that you could add some special decorations to the water; floating plants, waterfalls etc. This would indubitably be much easier to implement than getting a procedural thing that works well.

So I guess I’ll go with that!

Man explaining things really help you come up with solutions! Cheers folks!

-Gus