Container Water

As is the case for a number of Generalist Tech Artists out there, we tend to need to know – or learn – a lot of different things. Often we become proficient specifically at the tasks each different game sets us, and the current game I’m working on is quite exciting for this reason.

I am Fish is a sequel…

This is the second post (See the first here) in the my “Container Water” series where I’ll be going step by step (more-or-less) into how I’ve approached the creation of this effect for I am Fish. This post goes into detail about where I started with this effect, and at the time of writing the whole system is…

As I found in the last post in this series, just pushing verts down to the water’s surface comes with an immediate issue (as seen above in the featured image).

The verts very quickly fall outside of the original volume, which breaks the effect. Now if it was a sphere, we could mitigate this by not reducing the water…

With the water constrained into the bowl, I’ll now move onto the surface simulation. Here I wanted something more than sine waves for the surface of my water sim, mainly because our fish inside the bowl ideally want to interact with the water’s surface.

Damoiseaux described in his breakdown how he had used a spring system to…

Now that we have the two main visual foundations of this effect ready (the general shape, and the surface sim), it’s time to put them together in a shader. As I am Fish is the studio’s first project using Unity’s HD Render Pipeline, this is going to be an interesting experience, and my first real foray into Shader…

I didn’t want to age any of these posts my making 2020 references, but for an article about creating new normals… I couldn’t help it.

I just wandered through the process of putting together the first iteration of the fluid shader, but I was not happy with how the recalculated surface normals had turned out using ShaderGraph’s “Normal from heightmap”…

If this is your first exposure to this series of posts about the “Container Water”, you’ll not “heard” me moaning about ShaderGraph. Well, over my travels, I’ve been getting progressively more frustrated at the speed in which ShaderGraph allows me to work.

This post is a slight departure from the rest of the series as I want to record some…

This post details my continuing relationship with runtime fluid sim and compute shaders, and sadly is so far incomplete. However, I want to be less precious about what I post on my blog this year, and embrace “failure” as much as “success”. It’s frustrating to feel like I’m chasing “giants” in the field of computer graphics, and I do need…