I was tasked with modelling a ship for a game my friend is developing, and part of the ship’s model will be below the water line. What options do we have for making water not appear below decks?
We obviously cannot use terrain water for this, and planned on making custom water anyways.
This boat is a vehicle, and it will move and is drivable by players, so this deformation has to be done live
I suggested using bones to deform water around the hull of the ship, but the scripter says this will create too much lag, but we haven’t tried it yet because they are unwilling to do it because they believe it will just cause lag. Does anyone have experience with this? Would it actually cause this much lag?
Another idea I had is making a custom water part that is pre-deformed in blender around the hull of the ship, it would still be animated like regular water, and the actual ocean water mesh would only deform in a large rectangle around the ship, but the custom ship water mesh would create a seamless blend between the two, covering the hole. Would it cause less lag by only making the water deform in a basic rectangle like this?
We could also only make these calculations happen for players below deck, and only for people who are close enough to actually see it. For example, if you are on ship A and see ship B in the distance, players on ship A do not need to have ship B’s water deformation calculated. They can’t even see it, so what’s the point?
Someone suggested we use terrain deformation and just make water deform or replace into air inside the hitbox of the ship’s hull which could work but it might also cause a significant amount of lag, according to the scripter
We also cannot use the glass method to make water not render below decks, it would interfere with particle effects.
Perhaps there is a method to use a mesh without deforming at all, and just making it not render in some clever way when you are below decks, but without using glass. Maybe with an alpha texture?
One scripter is saying that smartbones is optimized enough that basic deformation should work and not be super laggy
Does anyone have experience with mesh deformation? How viable would this method be?
Thanks
-Falling
