Water, Water, Water... Oh, and fog. VERY IMPORTANT STUFF!

Ive been mapping for some time, but I still am confused by water. First off, I cant understand what water.lod.control does? The tutorial in Valve editing communty had very little detail, so please explain the whole transition thing. But I dont get it, my water seems to transform automaticly anyway? And the diffrent water materials seem to do diffrent things. I want a big open field of water, but in the distance it starts going brown and ugly (Like in de_aztec) and it looks crap. I want to be able to control the lod with that entity, but it doesnt seem to make a diffrence.
Also, fog. I dont get it either, it doesnt seem to fog in with the skybox, thus everything (Buildings and mountains) appear 100% white against the sky, which isnt affected at all by the fog, and thus it looks awful. Please help, how do I do fog properly? And do I need cubemaps for water? And lastly, when I made my water join onto a large field of water in the skybox (3D) by scaling the skybox water to 0.0650 or something, so it looked quite seamless. Is this right, considering the scale of the texure is 0.25 by default, so shouldnt I devide 0.25 by 16 to get the correct scale? And how come the mountains in my skybox wasnt reflected by the water in the skybox (Or maybe only not reflected when seen from the 'real world', but it may have been reflected if I went into the skybox.

HELP!

Don't bulk questions together like this - one topic per question is the way this system likes things done. We'll let you off this time around though :smile:

I've yet to use water LODs or fog (god, I don't exactly experiment much do I!?), but I think you need a seperate fog controller for the skybox in order to get fog in there too. I've seen people talking about matching the level fog and skybox fog, hence that belief.

You should be using cubemaps for all your map, not just for water. Cubemaps are used by a lot of materials, so dot them around liberally. There are tips in tutorials and things on how to place them effectively.

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Designer @ Haiku Interactive | ReNo-vation.net

The water LOD thing pretty much tells the computer how from how far away the water should be a pretty looking.

But even using it, it doesnt seem to make a difference. It justs automaticly transitions :sad:

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Hahaha! Im using the INTERNET!

Only one (expensive) water shader is rendered at the same time. If there are 2 water brushes visible from one spot of the map (even if it's behind a wall and only drawn because of bad or incomplete VIS compiling) then one of the water brushes will look like an ugly grey something or disappear completely.

Water is mostly controlled by the texture you choose. I didn't even put any water_lod_controls in my map which is probably not very elegant but the default settings work best.

But when you enter the distance for it to start becoming cheap, is it supposed to be the distance from the player? Im still a bit confused, do you mean the ENTIRE water brush looks cheap?

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Hahaha! Im using the INTERNET!

I dont know if it is my graphics card or something, but I dont seem to have 'cheap' water ever. Everything I try, every map I test with waterm every setting in the water LOD thing, but my water always stays expensive, with full reflections? What does cheap water look like, and at what distance does it become cheap?

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Hahaha! Im using the INTERNET!

Distance from your point of view, sounds obvious to me. Why don't you take a look at the Valve wiki for some more info?

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Create-ivity - a game development blog

The only problem that now remains is that my water never transforms into cheap water :sad: Cant understand why!

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Hahaha! Im using the INTERNET!

The only problem that now remains is that my water never transforms into cheap water :sad: Cant understand why!

Hmmm I've never seen this in any map. Doesn't sound that logical also. If you have expensive water it doesn't really matter if it becomes cheap 100 meters away, it would reflect half of the map in the 5 meters in front of you anyway, it would look odd to see the transition. Better use one cheap texture for the whole thing if you think it's to costly and forget about the transition. A screenshot with an example would be nice.

Also the more I read your initial post the more I think you mean the fog inside the water. This, again, is controlled by the textures themselves, I'm sure there is one that does what you want. If you'd like to control this with an entity I'd search for "fog distance".

The fog doesnt matter, cause I figured out just to match the for color with the bottom half of the skybox color. About the water, yeah, if it is a big area I use cheap water material and for small areas (With less detail) I use the highest expensive.

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Hahaha! Im using the INTERNET!