Right, it’s about time I get the last post of this series fired up. Last time, I showed you a Python script for Blender for generating a mesh, which we can use to make transparency on our cube work a bit better. Now it’s time to help the water look more like water and less like the animated, transparent plate that it is.
The effect of depth fog shown on an island.
Johannes had a chat with Marsh Davies from PCGAMER and the resulting interview is now up at pcgamer.com. This is our first mention in any press outlet and we are very excited about it.
If you happen to have come here from that interview, I would like to take this opportunity to say hi. Please make sure you check out our IndieDB-page where you can find more pictures and a couple of development videos from Freebooter.
Cheers,
Jakob
Yesterday we got a very warm reception over at /r/indiegaming and I ended up answering a lot of questions about various aspects of the game. You can check out the thread here.
We’ve been blown away by all the positive feedback the community at large is sending our way and right now it looks like we will have a lot of very exciting stuff happen in the near future.
Happy holidays, dear reader!
You have probably noticed the lack of updates from us during the holidays but fear not, for it has passed and we will be updating regularly again. Continue reading
In the previous posts of this series, we explored how cube-style waves can be made by setting the position of individual cubes using sliding simplex noise. We are missing something though: The water is opaque. We will probably want our water to be transparent and usually, you can just slap a material on it using a transparent shader, but if we do that, it ends up looking more like ice cubes than water.
A cubesea literally made of boxes looks more like an icecube-tray than water.
When you can see all of the boxes, the illusion that the sea consists of a single continuous body of water is broken. The effect we are after requires that we only render the surface of the water. My solution to this problem is a mesh that only contains the surface marked in the image above. In this post, I am going to show you a Python-script that will create such a mesh in Blender.
You can find it here – enjoy!
Hey again! Last time I promised that this installment would be about transparency and how to generate a single mesh with which to replace all those cubes. Unfortunately I have lost the Python script I used to generate the mesh and it is taken a bit longer than I thought to rewrite it, so instead I’ll write about how to make objects appear as if they are floating on the surface of the cube sea.
You expects objects such as ships to be affected by the seas motion, so if they are not, that would disrupts the illusion and the immersion in the game. The effect we’re after here is like the ship floating in the cube sea in the video embedded below (it is the same video I showed you in the previous post). The ship tilts and bobs up and down with the water.