Linden Water Texture

Search apparently no longer work on this forum.

Yay.

Ahem.

Anyway, is there any way to get the water texture used on the Linden water?

Thanks!

Hey, Isablan. Search is working like it always did for me- when your search includes the word "Linden" you get a white screen. In all other cases, you get results.

This has always struck me as incredibly childish.

And what an interesting question. If it's not one of the library textures, the only thing I can think of is to maybe ask some of the terrain folks (search for threads with the word "terrain" in their title).

If you know Adam Zaius, you might ask him - he's done a lot of creating both SL and Opensim sims.

It's not a texture. It's a dynamic GL shader effect. There's no static imagery associated with it. It works on an entirely different principle from the "slap a picture on a surface" methodology you're used to from building in SL.

If you want a static texture that looks like Linden water, point your camera straight down at the ocean, and take a screenshot. That's the best you can do.

Ah, thanks. I realized later that it wouldn't work (what I was wanting to play with) anyway.

Interesting to know that "Linden" was the killer word. Every time I searched for Linden Water Texture I got a 404 page.

Thanks, again!

Yep even if you do get a close match for Linden water it will look wrong at different times of day, really need to script it to change textures, even then it will look wrong id someone sets their time other than the sim default.

Sure would be nice if they'd let us create "water prims", wouldn't it? Really, there's no reason the same shader couldn't be applied to other objects besides just the water plane. Just another item in a years-old list of suggestions that has gone unanswered by LL.

I hate to say it, but frankly, the (circa 1995) texture system we have to work with is a joke. LL once promised us a "Maya-like material shader system" would be "coming soon" to replace it. That was 4 years ago, if I recall.

One day I was peeping the pipline and I saw a normal map fly by. It looked tilable and the pattern looked much like normals for water. Saw a few normal maps fly by.

Anybody know if a normal map is used for water and things?

I do believe so for water. You can take a look at the fragment shader in ...\SecondLife\app_settings\shaders\class1\environment\waterF.glsl

Wow. More stuff to dig through. Thank a lot, Py! Heh.

Actually, there is some interesting stuff in there. I'm not familiar with OGL and I don't completely understand the referencing, but still interesting what I can gleen at a glance.

Here, check this chunk out:

//add "backlighting" effect
float colorAcc;
colorAcc = 1.0 - clothing.w;
norm.z -= colorAcc * 0.2;

//renormalize normal (again)
norm = normalize(norm);

That is awesome. Well, not the chunk exactly, but the insight it provides into how some of the rendering quirks work.

What do you think would happen if you changed the 0.2 to something else?