Watervolume Shader

Overview

In CRYENGINE 3.5 and beyond, the Watervolume Shader is a dedicated shader designed to be used just on Water Volume objects. In earlier versions of CRYENGINE it was part of the main Water Shader as a shader parameter.

Shader Params

A few notes about the Watervolume shader:

  • The Detail normals texture is not an external texture, rather a texture generated by the engine, through code.
  • The Decal options will not appear in the Shader Params unless a texture is put into the Decal slot to activate it. The Decal Bumpmap slot will also appear after this.
  • Flow map textures go in the Detail texture slot.

Parameter

Description

Shader Gen Requirement

Decal falloff

Controls the falloff amount for decal texture.

Decal texture slot use

Decal strength

Set the strength of the decal texture.

Decal texture slot use

Decal tiling

Tiling of the decal layer.

Decal texture slot use

Detail normals scale

Scale the detail bump normals intensity.

Default

Detail tiling

Set detail bump tilling.

Default

Env projection scale

Controls the projection scale, or the tiling, of the specified environment map.

Default

Env reflection amount

Controls the reflection amount of of the environment map. Can be offset with Specular Color.

Default

Flow map scale

Control the scale, or tiling, of the flow map texture.

Water flow map

Flow offset strength

Strength of flow animation offset map.

Water flow map

Flow offset tiling

Tiling scale for flow animation offset map.

Water flow map

Flow speed

Specify the speed of the flow effect.

Water flow

Foam amount

Control the amount of foam placed on the water surface.

Foam

Foam soft intersection

Controls how the foam behaves from contact areas.
Foam forms around intersecting objects and the terrain, once it gets close to the surface.

Foam

Foam tiling

Set the tiling amount of the foam texture. Foam texture is located in EngineAssets/Shading/WaterFoam.tif

Foam

Gloss bias

Specular texture slot use

Gloss scale

Specular texture slot use

Gloss tiling

Controls the tiling amount for the Specular texture.

Specular texture slot use

Normals scale

Controls the scale of the normals. Not to be confused with Detail normals.

Default

Rain ripples tiling

Set the tiling amount for the rain ripples texture.

Default

Realtime reflection amount

Control the reflection amount for the Realtime Reflection.

Default

Soft intersection factor

Similar to the Foam soft intersection but for the base water surface.

Default

Tiling

Changes the amount of texture map tilling on the water surface.

Default

Vertex wave scale

Strength of vertex displaced wave animation.

Default

Shader Gen Params

Parameter

Description

Realtime Reflection

Approximate realtime reflections.

Water flow

Enable water to flow along geometry UVs.

Water flow map

Enable water flow along a flow map.

Sun specular

Activate for water sunshine.

Debug flow map

Enable visualizing flow map.

Foam

Enables foam.

Examples

The following images contain a base Watervolume material along with an environment map.

Most features are "moving" features aren't can't effectively be showcased through images but some tweaking and experiments should yield noticeable differences fairly easily.

Specular and Glossiness

Specular 0Specular 255 / Gloss 0Specular 255 / Gloss 128Specular 255 / Gloss 255

Environment Map Reflection and Projection

Env reflection amount 2Env reflection amount 4Env projection scale 1Env projection scale 0

Normals

Normals scale 0.1Normals scale 0.5 (default)Normals scale 1Normals scale 4

Realtime Reflections

Realtime Reflection OffRealtime Reflection OnRealtime reflection amount 2Realtime reflection amount 16

Foam

Foam tiling 2 / Foam amount 8Foam Tiling 0.2Foam soft intersect 0.02Foam amount 0.25

Decal

For the below example, a new material was created: GameSDK\Materials\water\watervolumes\water_algae_surface.mtl

Decal Strength 0 - HighDecal Strength 3 - HighDecal Strength 0 - LowDecal Strength 0 - Low