Water waves model from TFT main menu screen

[starter_e]

Good evening all. I was staring blankly at the Frozen Throne main menu screen when I noticed the water waves were not an illusion created by the floating ice chunks. I looked for a water wave model and couldn't find anything. I was wondering if anyone could somehow get a hold of ("extract"?) the waves from the MainMenu3d_exp.mdx and publish them as a model?
Many thanks.

 

[PrinceYaser]

Do you want this?:

Hidden

 

[starter_e]

I was looking at the waves in this file and wondering if a model can be made with water waves animation like that.

 

[Hermit]

I was looking at the waves in this file and wondering if a model can be made with water waves animation like that.

I know Talavaj made some complex water models, but I don't think he uploaded them anywhere.

 

[starter_e]

That`s beautiful thanks for the info. I`ll def ask him. If he doesn't respond, wouldn't it be less of a chore to just "extract"(if it's possible) the water model from the MainMenu3d_exp.mdx than to make it from scratch?

 

[Hermit]

wouldn't it be less of a chore to just "extract"(if it's possible) the water model from the MainMenu3d_exp.mdx than to make it from scratch?

It wouldn't look good because only a small part of it (the edge that is closest to the camera) is animated to move like waves.

 

[starter_e]

Hmm what if someone "cut out" a square from the lower left(in top down view) part of the model in the file?

 

[Hermit]

Hmm what if someone "cut out" a square from the lower left(in top down view) part of the model in the file?

You still won't be able to use it as a doodad and place two of them next to each other because their edges will never be at the same height (waves will be overlapping like this) and it will look horrible if you use only one and scale it up.

 

[Talavaj]

It's a lot easier to just make a new model.
Only the corner vertices and the opposite-edge vertices have to match which you can easily achieve by assigning them to the same bone.

Check out the model by iNfraNe whether that is something you would want to use.
It's a water plane that would be easy to animate like this.

 

[Hermit]

It's a water plane that would be easy to animate like this.

How? That model only has 12 quadrangles that create the impression that the water has depth. The water from the menu screen has a complex mesh that looks like this:

Hidden

 

[Talavaj]

How?

I know, I didn't mean it in a literal sense of editing that exact model.
Just that it would be easy to make a model which looks like that and also has a similar wavy animation in the top layer.

I suggested the model by iNfraNe because it already has the texture ID animation in global sequence, which would be very easy to paste into a new model on top of a wavy animation.
It would be convenient to use that model as a basis, since everybody uses it already and it would be easy to just replace in existing projects.

 

[Talavaj]

So I did the water, but there is a bunch of problems with the idea.
One is that although the animations align, the in-game rendering does not, since the sequences aren't synced the water will become de-synced anytime it pops in/out of rendering.
Maybe it is something that can be fixed with global animations.

Another problem is, that you can't squish the vertical scale of this model unlike that of iNfraNe's because it will also squish the waving animation, so you are kind of stuck with the default depth and to make it look less/more transparent you would have change the material blending in the model itself, which is easy but annoying.

Anyway, here is the model for now.

 

[starter_e]

+rep Thanks a bunch!

 

[Talavaj]

Making one big water plane would probably not be feasible due to the limitations of the engine.

But I have (kind of) fixed the issue.
Making the waves global doesn't do anything, but by breaking the extents and bounds I forced them to be rendered always. (or a pretty sizable chunk of them anyway)
I have no idea what this will do with the performance if you spam it.

Problem is, it also crashes the editor and the game if you select the water planes "edited" this way.
So I added a version of the water which will not crash the editor but one that looks the same.
So first import the model called "_editor" put your water however you want it to be like and when you are done replace the model with the _boundless version.
So far it works on a pretty big map in-game like that, just make sure to not click the boundless model ever again, replace it back with the editor model if you need to adjust it or something.

To be honest I don't understand why the global sequence doesn't align up since the texture id sequence in global animation does.
I may have made a mistake or something, though I went through the model again and the global animation seems to be fine.

There is an alternate way that it might work, by extending the model outwards and making the edges blend in so that even if they misalign it probably wouldn't be very noticeable.
The problem is that it would require a custom texture, in other words a massive filesize.