Hey Becky... Your Ocean...

... how'd you do it?

the reflective surfaces i mean...

nothing specific, just in general... i need something to bring some life to my ocean...

a dedicated cubemap???

thx

--Mike

You already answered the question, cubemapping. :)

I've found there is no need to update all 6 cells every update, infact there's no need for a down cell at all, I update 1 cell a frame if I recall, sometimes when i've used it in the past I update 2 or 3 cells a frame, but never all 6 for water because the movement of the water and the lower resolution of the cube map blurs the image enough that a minor imprecision in the reflect isn't noticed and saves a bundle of rendering time.

Thanks Becks... for your insights and wisdom...

seriously, thx

--Mike

Where you not moving to 3DRAD for your sub sim game though ?

i'm moving all over the place... Blitz version aint dead yet... doing work on it as we speak... err, type...


--Mike

*POINTS FURIOUSLY AT HIS SIG*

lol.

Actually, i never knew there was no need for a down cell- might just be how your rendering though :)

Think about it like a box surrounding the water surface Cygnus, the water is reflecting whatever it's angle (or it's vertex normals if you like) is pointing at, in most water systems you are viewing the water surface from above you will never reflect what is underneath.

An underneath reflection could only happen if you made the waves so violent they crested over like in a surfing simulation, which is quite a hard effect to achieve in realtime. However, if you made your waves like that you will actually reflect the water below and not the seabed, which wouldn't work with a cubemap anyway.

Therefore I personally cannot see a need to render a down surface when doing a reflection cube map for a planar surface like the ocean.