I want to show some of my screenshots taken from the recent testbed on “Water reflection”, from the ground up, it includes the diffuse texturing, specular texturing, specular highlighting, reflection, and ripple (or perturbation texturing).
Below you will find the screenshots from the start of the testbed’s process.
I am so sorry that I cannot include any in-depth detail here, due to I have no time at all right now. So I decide to post my progress in screenshots instead. If you visit my blog site, you will find that most of the posts are about the showcase.
But I can give you brief detail about all of this.
In order to do the more realistic (at least close enough to realistic) reflection water on the floor, road or anything shinny. You have to create the reflection plane first, then draw the reflected scene into it. In which case, you can blend it with the prior floor below it as I did here. You should set the appropriate renderstate correctly to give you out the most realistic scene (also consider performance.).
After that, you add more realistic effect, to make it looks more like the water. It’s the ripples, or technically called “perturbation of texture”. This case, you need a bump map, to represent your randomness of the way the reflected scene you drawed will look like. In this case, the bump map is the water’s wave, it represents the flatness of each pixel in the water in which you drawed it into the reflected plane recently.
Finally, you come close to the natural look of water. Note that I am not don’t yet with the “fresnel term”. In which it will need one more texture to be added its color with, it’s refraction map.
Afterall, enjoys the following gallery.!
