Realistic Water help

Help and Feedback Scripting Support
1

I want to make more realistic water using skinned meshes for my roblox game, inspired by subnautica. So you will be underwater 95% of the time.

So the problems are:

  1. I have absolutely no clue on how to make GOOD skinned meshes for water, they either don’t work, or look disgusting.
  2. Even if I make the skinned meshes, how would I make like under the water, since its a flat mesh.
  3. I have to do all this with chunk generation too.
2

Hey! Fellow Subnautica fan here, that game is amazing! I actually tried making underwater stuff before and it was a pain lol. Here’s what worked for me:

1. Water Meshes:

  • Use a subdivided plane (32x32 or 64x64) in Blender
  • Add bones in a grid pattern
  • Use Gerstner waves instead of basic sin waves (trust me on this one, makes a huge difference)
  • Check this tutorial: Realistic Oceans Using Mesh Deformation

2. Underwater Detection:

-- Raycast upward from camera to detect if underwater
local ray = workspace:Raycast(camera.CFrame.Position, Vector3.new(0, 100, 0))

or just kiss (“keep it simple stupid”, i use that every time a thing can be more simple and better), do it like subnautica, based on the height

3. Chunk Generation:

  • Only generate water in active chunks around player
  • Use LOD - fewer bones for distant chunks
  • Blend chunk edges with bone interpolation
  • Pool water objects for performance (learned this the hard way when my test game started lagging)

4. Underwater Effects:

  • Color correction (blue tint)
  • Blur effect
  • Depth-based lighting
  • Particle effects for bubbles

Helpful Resources:

Hope this helps! Feel free to ask if you get stuck on any of this stuff.

3 Likes
3

Wow, didn’t actually expect someone to give this much detail. Thank you so much, it will take time to do all of this but I’ll know how to do all of this. Thank you so much.

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4

Quick question, the plane is flat so I can only see the top of it, is there any way to see the surface kinda from in the water? If you see this.

5

oh nvm im dumb i forgot about doublesided.

1 Like
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