Reply To: Collab 2021 WIP elcangrejo
It’ll be for rendering in Eevee, and I don’t think we’ll have time to port over all the assets to UE.
Can you share the file? I’m not sure what would make it so slow. Is it super heavily subdivided or something?
Ok, on to the questions from the file from Discord. The Dynamic Paint effect is only really needed if the objects in the river are going to be moving around. Since we can have all of them be static, it would be much more efficient to just paint a mask for the foam using vertex paint.
Using that vertex paint mask (which can be fairly soft so we can get a transition between black and white as well), we can set up a procedural shader that places the foam in those areas:
The texture in the example isn’t perfect, but hopefully it gives some ideas.
As mentioned on Discord, the original shader doesn’t do screen space reflections and it gets darker when looked at on an angle, so we need to go with something that behaves more believably to light so that it ties in well with the other parts of the scene.
We can then get reflections by mixing a transparent shader with a glossy shader:
After messing with this setup I found that switching out the transparent shader for a diffuse or emission shader works better to help sell the colors. Which one you use is up to you, but be aware that both will look wrong in different contexts. I also added some bump (that can be whatever texture you want) to make the reflections wavy and the stack of transparent planes to give it depth.
The file is in the drive if you want to poke around. Hope that helps!