Waterfall Foams

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Reflection

Initially, I was thinking of making the whole water system into a landscape. However, when I thought about waterfalls, it complicated things as it would look weird in certain areas. It might be best to keep things as separate assets instead. I'm not saying that the landscape water system is off the table as I still need to do some further experiments to fully decide on what sort of water would be best.

Another thing about creating waterfall is that it might be easier to convert into a river system which I might utilise in vertex painting the flow maps or landscape layer.

Research

I've been looking into making foams for the waterfalls and there are many different approaches. The most common approaches I've seen is using vertexnormals that JoyceMinionsArt uses, Vertex painting that UnrealSimon uses and distance fields/Depth fade that Tritonethegame uses.


Waterfall From Rime



Waterfall

I went with the Vertex Normal option as that is something I have not tried experimenting with. This is what I was able to produce: 
My first waterfall foam experiment based on Vertex Normals.

After creating this Vertex Normal- based waterfall foam, I feel this option may not be ideal for my water system as I have to nudge the vertices just to get the bottom foam to appear. It also won't produce the foam for overlapping objects. However, it works great on the foams at the top.  I might just have it at the top and use distance fields/depth fade so it works in a similar way. Some manual vertex painting might also be worth adding in.

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