I think it’s funny how our minds want wavy underwater… because it’s a pain in the ass to implement, and totally unrealistic… in real life, no such thing occurs.
…unless you are somehow viewing underwater through a mask that waves around.
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actualy it’s imposible for the air to reflect light to water, not matter what you do.
If the surface of the mask were wavy and moving like the surface of water then the water would refract as in the animation above. But no such thing exists.
It’s as fake as lens flares in medieval RPG games.
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It does happen, but I think it depends on different densities of water passing each other, like when brine meets fresh or hot meets cold. There’s an example in this video, but i can’t really explain why it actually occurs. Maybe because the differing densities cause it to travel in different directions?
Look around 1:10 and 1:28
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Same reason as why it happens in the air.
Different temperatures → different densities
Hah. You ninja’d my edit.
I remember scuba diving in some lakes up here in Ontario. The thermocline in some areas were so drastic you not just see them but literally feel the level where they truly flip from 1 differential to another. Thermodynamics is crazy stuff.
In some case you could hear it as well… Normally sounded like someone screaming as their pelvic area hit it… and that screaming may have been me… But I’m unwilling to do further scientific research on the mater.
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Watched the whole video… not once did I see anything that looked like the fake wavy “underwater” effect that 3D visualizations feel like they need to use to convince someone they are underwater.
I didn’t even stop to think about this.
I felt the underwater need something, it felt a bit clinical, I was using the waviness to try and sell the pressure surges your body / head experience. Perhaps some camera translation may do the trick.
I think that would achieve a very realistic effect if done right. As the snorkellers/scuba divers here will attest, at the surface the waves push you around a lot. As you drop lower down, waves effect you very little or not at all, depending on wave height and intensity. If you synced camera translation with the passing waves,I think you could achieve the effect you’re looking for.
Also, attenuation under water follows a different curve than for air. So some fog with the right colors and curve might help sell “under water”. Oh, especially if you can make it blur a little instead of just go foggy.
I don’t know if this is even possible in a shader but there’s 1 other thing that happens under water that I don’t see often in water shaders/systems (Heck even Subnautica didn’t REALLY do this… they kinda cheated honestly). The deeper you go the less light gets through but not ALL light since different wave lengths penetrate further than others.
Yet another reason why most scuba diving is limited to 30 feet really. Coral looks like coral at this depth. Deeper and it starts looking bland unless you bring a flashlight.
Regardless your water is looking amazing.
Very possible.
Unfortunately , well or fortunately, I’ve hit a crossroad I’ve not yet encountered: realism vs function.
I could kill all light down deep, but then you wouldn’t see anything, yes I get this is the point, but its not useful (for me) in a game context. Waviness doesn’t actually happen but helps sell the effect.
Soooo my next suggestion of occasionally having an extremely small flash of light due to cosmic rays hitting a water molecule just right confirming the existence of Neutrino’s hitting our (virtual) planet would be too much?.. Shame. 
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do you have an image or video reference ?
Note: for Mythruna, I kicked on the depth of field filter with a near focus and set my fog to a grayish blue. It worked pretty well… but probably what really sold it was the underwater sounds.
lol Dear lord man. I’m being silly at this point. They’re doing basically what I was suggesting in Antarctica by pointing a buncha camera’s at a huge block of ice to try to capture these micro flashes. The other place they were doing this was in Sudbury Ontario with this thing that was also filled with water:
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Ok cool, I will simply replicate the physics going on in that experiment, per frag, and use the results for flashes, ez
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I did this, however there were no flashes, they are looking in vain, oh well
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Doesn’t look like much:
…but that’s the mphys library finally integrated with Zay-ES.
I started to make a network app with this stuff and realized I never built that integration… got sidetracked making one for Bullet and forgot to swing back.
I still need to work out how I want to do the debug states and stuff before I get back to the networking app (and clean up the demo code for this one). Hopefully soon I can get back to my real tasking.
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