First of all, I am a young graphics designer so ignore me if this seems to be a bit odd to you.
For a long time (on and off since around Sept 2012(Yes 12!)), I have been researching and looking for a way to create unique puddles for video games.
A lot of research, testing, attempting and ultimately failing has gone into this so far and I thought it was time to simply ask developers their take on this topic.
Puddles and shallow water in video games helps our minds to immerse itself in the environment, along with other cleverly placed specular elements such as mud, metal and even wood.
But how easy is it to create the substance textures for a realistic-looking puddle, and could it be easily done in a video game? The simple answer, Yes.
But that yes begs another question: How?
For the past 3 years, that is what I set out to find out, how to create realistic puddle textures that work well with lighting and merge well with the textures below them to create realistic puddles.
After several attempts using both hand-coded shaders and Shader-Forge’d shaders, I eventually came to the conclusion that:
A. Generating a puddle in a shader was not that easy
B. Using noise as an alpha mask would not work very well
These may seem like fairly obvious things but good research explores the unlikely areas as well as the likely.
My next attempt to do this was using texture masks created from actual photos, so I got out my DSLR and spend the better part of 6 months collecting images of puddles from around the south of Britain (where I live) and around places like Scotland and London when on holiday or out for the day.
The plan was to use Photoshop to “cut out” the puddle from it’s surroundings and create a huge library of high-quality masks from these, this did not work very well either.
As expected, this led to jagged edges around the “break” areas on the outside where the water meets the ground, using some clever filtering effects I was able to get rid of these, but the results were still not up to standards.
After those failures I decided to go back to something I had initially dismissed years ago, using Photoshop itself to create the puddles.
After spending many weeks exploring the ins-and-outs and hidden features of Photoshop, I was ready to attempt this, results were not too bad but would not create custom shapes and required a lot of effort and time to create one generic-looking puddle.
I decided to streamline this process using a set of painstakingly crafted Actions which record the “actions” you take in Photoshop and allow for replication, this helped me speed up the process, but using the clouds in Photoshop to do this just didn’t create the kind of look I was going for.
A few days ago I decided to play LEGO Jurassic World, and some of the other newer LEGO games such as Lord of the Rings and things like that and noticed the puddles in those games look spectacular.
My hope is that a developer or designed will reply to this and help me achieve the same kind of quality in puddles as games like that.
I have released quite a bit of free content in the past and this is something I would like to do next, a huge library of puddle textures.
Anyone with information on how to do this well, or anyone wanting to help with this is more than welcome to post below, any help with this will be credited in the library.
Thanks.
