Water features a lot in video games – Bertie even ran a Five of the Best supporter’s piece on it earlier this year. But how do developers actually make it look so, well, water-like?
According to 3D artist Thomas of Twitter account Stylized Station, there is a lot involved to get it just right. It takes “a ton of smoke and mirrors in the background, without anyone ever realising it,” they explained in a very thorough Twitter thread, noting “creating real-time simulated water is still really hard to do”.
Thomas stated that most developers use a variety of “cheats” and techniques that see things such as textures, VFX sprites, normal maps, and basic geometry “smashed together” in order to give the “illusion of flowing water”.
Thomas shared examples from Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End (pictured above), and Far Cry 5. According to their thread, both of these games trick the eye by layering moving textures over simple geometry.
“These normal maps do a great job of faking the micro details of waves and ripples you see on a large body of water without having to simulate anything; it’s just moving two simple textures over a plane. Our monkey brains fill in the rest of the details for us,” they explained.