Thanks for taking the time to post those, any chance of one you consider to be good, in whichever programme you feel is appropriate?

The water looks realistic if you fly or hover just above the surface, but it looks unnatural from 500' AMSL and higher. Noel's  first screen capture above show what we are talking about. I must admit though, that the second shot looks much better with NLB ="Allowed".That's the P3d default setting for the R331.93 driver that I'm using.

 

The other question I have. Are people seeing white caps or are they mistaking reflection from the sun as white caps?

 

Lastly, has anyone seen the undulating shoreline phenomenon? The land directly adjacent to the water moves up and down like the water does.

 

Edit:

 

Now this is water. Battlefield 4 walkthrough, Singapore Mission. (Don't click on the link, if gore and/or profanity offends you, since there is a lot of the former and a bit of latter scattered throughout the video):

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kwFkkrRHrQo

One cannot argue that that, indeed looks like water.

 

However, from what you've shown, what exactly are you saying? Simple question.

I've already stated my concerns regarding the water in P3d2, in various posts in this thread.

Thanks for taking the time to post those, any chance of one you consider to be good, in whichever programme you feel is appropriate?

The screenshots from REX4 for V2 water the water looks slightly soft but way better.  This one for REX4 for FSX/DX9 I think looks pretty good:

The screenshots from REX4 for V2 water the water looks slightly soft but way better. This one for REX4 for FSX/DX9 I think looks pretty good:

http://forum.avsim.net/public/style_images/master/attachicon.gif smgallery11.jpg

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To compare, this is a shot of real water, just a random search on google.

http://www.stockphotopro.com/photo-thumbs-2/AJ8CXP.jpg

For a while I've been watching these posts on how dreadful the water is in P3D v2, the poor behavior of floatplanes, AI and model ship wakes, etc, etc.

I think that;

People need to get it into their heads this is not FSX anymore, and the water animation is a new feature

Understand what tessellation is all about.

In short the water is now a fully 3D, dynamic surface (with water on ultra and terrain mesh at 1m. Now people go and inject water textures and wave animations made for a 2D water rendering system (FSX) from AS2012 or REX, and get horrible results.

If you inject these water colors and animations form these systems, and go into the texture folder in your P3D installation, find OceanHeight20FieldLayer.dds, and open it (with Aces Image Tool in either the FSX / P3D SDK), you will see what the problem is. These have now become legacy textures!

They have imbedded, directional wave patterns, some water themes more prominent than others, but they all have "waves" patterns imbedded in them. Now if you have P3D 3D water animation on, and use one of these textures, you are merely overprinting and masking the P3D effect, with some potentially terrible results! If the wave direction in the OceanHeight20FieldLayer.dds, is a right angles to the wind direction you really get a really scrambled tartan pattern.

What is needed to really show P3D's water effects properly are uniform or non-directional textures in the OceanHeight20FieldLayer*.dds files. I have tested this and the difference is amazing. If I put a uniform blue in (convert DDS to bmp with the Aces Image tool, edit in a graphics editor to fill with the blue you like, covert back to DXT1, create mipmaps, and save as OceanHeight20FieldLayer.dds to OceanHeight20FieldLayer4.dds (these are the only ones AS20102 changes in the p3D texture folder), I find the water effect better but the reflectivity very high.

By random pixellating the texture with a different blue, I get the results shown in the pictures below. Not perfect, still have to experiment with the pixellating (that is what creates the sparkle relection effect in the images below), I get a reasonable result.

Now this kind of work is best left to the REX and HiFi graphics experts, but I just wanted to make the point that we are jumping the gun, judging the new bride here after we have cloaked her in old rags. Wait till the specialist devs get hold of this and then you'll see water!

I do think LM slipped up by not including new default OceanHeight20FieldLayer*.dds texture files in the V2 release that would have showed off their work properly. Maybe they just knew the first thing people would do is overwrite these with REX or AS2012 anyhow!

 

At 2500 feet

 

http://i1372.photobucket.com/albums/ag329/rwhsim/WaterUniform2500m_zps4fe09f74.jpg

 

At 500 feet

 

http://i1372.photobucket.com/albums/ag329/rwhsim/WaterUniform500m_zps34b4df7a.jpg

 

 

Rob

Rob, at last some common sense.

 

When the first images were posted it was clear that... Well it wasn't default that's for sure. That's why I posted the default ones.

 

Thank you for your insight

Unfortionately for me, I have nothing else installed and the default water is what is questionable, especially at low altitude. However, in my opinion it does look better the higher you fly. It makes total sense that instsalling dx9 textures and animations in P3D is not going to work. The don't really work in dx10 either.

The water looks realistic if you fly or hover just above the surface, but it looks unnatural from 500' AMSL and higher. Noel's first screen capture above show what we are talking about. I must admit though, that the second shot looks much better with NLB ="Allowed".That's the P3d default setting for the R331.93 driver that I'm using.

 

The other question I have. Are people seeing white caps or are they mistaking reflection from the sun as white caps?

 

Lastly, has anyone seen the undulating shoreline phenomenon? The land directly adjacent to the water moves up and down like the water does.

 

Edit:

 

Now this is water. Battlefield 4 walkthrough, Singapore Mission. (Don't click on the link, if gore and/or profanity offends you, since there is a lot of the former and a bit of latter scattered throughout the video):

 

LOL, I seriously thought this was the type of water we were going to get in V2

 

 

 

Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk HD

Your joking right?

Your joking right?

Nope

That's really setting expectations high! :lol:

 

If you think BF4 is good, check out the water in Assassin's Creed 4 and that's a legit sandbox game. 

LOL, I seriously thought this was the type of water we were going to get in V2

 

 

 

Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk HD

I expected the water to look at least as good as it does in P3d 1.4. It doesn't. Sure it has waves, but for the most part, when flying at anything above a skim or a hover, the water surface looks, well, it looks like Noel's screen captures in this thread. And that's if you set tessellation to ultra and mesh to 1 m.

 

Of course, I didn't expect the water to look like it does in BF4. I just posted that to demonstrate that there aren't any programming limitations that block the creation of more realistic water depictions.

 

Anyway, back to checking out the water issues. If the wind is such that the water motion is just a gentle swell, float planes and the LM-supplied submersible bob up and down properly with the swell. It's only when you try higher wind speeds, that the motion becomes unnatural. It almost looks as if there is an artificial limit imposed through coding, on the amount that the CG of any floating vehicle can move with water motion.

 

It will also be interesting to see whether the REX Direct 4 textures will improve matters. It's very possible that textures designed expressly to work under DX11 will solve some of the issues. And there are issues with water in P3d2. LM has stated so on their official message board. The issues aren't bugs, but rather that 2.0 was the first shot at incorporating water animations under DX11. They'll get it optimized soon enough.

By random pixellating the texture with a different blue, I get the results shown in the pictures below. Not perfect, still have to experiment with the pixellating (that is what creates the sparkle relection effect in the images below), I get a reasonable result.

 

 

I dispensed with my responses to the other comments first since the reactions to my BF4 example were more playful than constructive

 

But your post truly defines the issue. You not only stated what was wrong more clearly than anyone else has, but you also demonstrated though experimentation how to go about fixing what's wrong. But some other people apparently still believe that there isn't a problem with either the default water or even the REX DX10 water if used in P3d2.

 

I think my comments regarding water in P3d2 have been thrown into the category of :Cry: P3d2 naysaying :Cry: and there certainly is some of that going on here on AVSim. This is really my only negative comment about the default version of P3d2.Other people have complaints about P3d2, but I suggest that it's either because they don't have the hardware and/or the patience to get the app to work right.