How Water Works (in Video Games)
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- Опубліковано 5 лют 2025
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Cyberpunk with 1.5 is now finally displaying bullet impact on water :D
It only took 2 years
@@darkdroide Has it really been out that long? Jesus!
its funny cause its actually still the most minimal effort because they use the same texture for when you are moving in the water it just repeats the texture 100s of times
@@IllyasArt No, it's been 1 year. Cyberpunk 2077 released in December 2020.
@@IllyasArt no 💀
My 3d animation professor always said the hardest thing to animate has always been fine hair and water. People do not realize that many video game and movie animators have to build custom engines for animating complex physics sometimes.
Didn't Pixar essentially invented a new hair physics for tangled?
@@kendarr Specifically for Rapunzel, yes. No one else in the movie uses the same hair physics because they wanted it to follow more of a spring-like action but they had to keep it's movement light and fluid because in real-life her hair would have weighed close to 100lbs.
@@JMulvy Yeah I remember that, and the spring physics for that ginger girl, with and bow, my memory is horrible today my god..
@@kendarr Merida from Brave is one of my favorites. 😁 I love that movie.
@@kendarr What about Sulley's entire goddamn body?
The most impressive use of water in rdr2, for me, is after it rains there's still water dripping from shop awnings and gutters. The level of detail in small bodies of water help sell the immersion. Details you don't really notice because of how brilliantly mundane they are.
I remember watching a vid about Mario Galaxy's water, and how they did with layers of distortion, scrolling textures, and displacement maps. Really interesting to see how games with different art styles need different approaches. Really cool video!
For anyone wondering, video is called "How scrolling textures gave Super Mario Galaxy 2 its charm", it's a really great watch!
Saw the same video and I've always had a soft spot for mario galaxy games
YESSS credit Michael jasper ashworth for it, his channel is now named just “jasper”, everybody go check out the vids with a ton of views on his channel pls it’s so worth it
In super mario galaxy case, it was because of the different structure of the water
Sometimes the simplest designs require the most complex problem solving. ☺️
This man built up an 8 minute suspense just to roast Cyberpunk for a second haha, deserves more recognition!
I'm actually making an underwater game in Unity at the moment, and constantly reworking the shaders to better suit my use case. It's really crazy how all of the physical effects of light with water (e.g. depth fog, caustics, snell's law, surface distortion, light attenuation) are all implemented by layering in different approximations for each effect
Nice! May the C# and Json Gods bless you on your project, fellow Unity Dev!
Yeah water is so complex, subnautica was made in unity if I'm not mistaken
Is there not a 'water library' or something that can be meshed with a game?
you have the same name as my physics teacher lol
so basically subnautica
The bottle liquid shader by Matthew Wilde is still so extremely impressive.
From Half Life: Alyx?
@@imapigeonyoupeasant1489 Yes, it looks like a fluid simulation
@@claudius2049 Yes
@@user-vi4xy1jw7e yes
IT HAS BUBBLES
I think subnautica does a good job. You can't see too far when in the water giving off that eerie effect as if something is going to come out and attack you. You don't swim at insane speeds without help of tool, and it's a fun game.
can't wait to see that breaking down sea of thieves artstyle, that game has such good visuals
Don't know what there is to break down more though. Hand painted textures on stylized sculpted 3D models. Similar how even world of warcraft did it, just a lot more higher resolution.
The nice visuals are mostly due to the epic creative skills of the artists. Not much technically strange going on there
@@DrTheRich The overall game has a simplistic visual. I'd assume he wants to break down even more the "water" part of it.
the water in sea of thieves is better than pretty much any other game out. i've watched some videos on it, they are using that nvidia water system with masterful shader tuning.
@@DrTheRich On the contrary, there's a huge deal of technical mastery behind the scenes of Sea of Thieves, as explained in this video: ua-cam.com/video/KxnFr5ugAHs/v-deo.html
sea of thieves has the best water i've seen in any game. it's really technically impressive and artistically impressive
Whats really cool about raytracing is, once it becomes possible for every video card to at least do 30fps, all the effort into faking lighting can go away but you can put all that into stylizing and other parts of the game to improve quality. Things will only get better when tech can simulate in realtime.
That's the part that people don't get when they dismiss it as a gimmick: it greatly improves workflows for designers & artists, and enables use of environments that were previously impossible or would be guaranteed to look like garbage with faked techniques. The gap in visual quality will also only grow as time goes on and real time ray traced techniques mature, leaving raster rendering in the dust.
@@mettaursp309 yes it's a good thing and improves the quality of games, but right now barely any video cards can run it smoothly on all games so right now, very realistic shaders still have to be created to be able to get the same feel on a pc or console that can't handle rtx. that's why it's considered a gimmick, it's not changing anything at the moment but making it more mainstream will change things
Moores law is dead.
Goodluck getting raytracing to work.
Raytracing currently still only simulated very few bounces compared to real light that bounces continously. So that future where raytracing is not a gimmick is 10-20 years away
@@nightmare4eVerr1 completely realistic raytracing with infinite bounces will never be able to be rendered real time. with 1 to 5 bounces could be in 2 to 4 years
imagine a game with some actual real time calculated water physics. Just imagine how cool and satisfying it would be.
RDR2 is the closest
PC explode
@@aryyancarman705 honestly optimization can do miracles. Take a look at ray tracing. 10 years ago the idea of fully dynamic light was border line science fiction. Anything could happen
@@darkigg well the ocean water isn’t dynamic. It’s just REALLY well made. You can’t move each individual drops of water in a certain direction. The only dynamic water in rdr2 is the one in jars/bottles.
If you dont mind your game running 10 minutes per frame, yeah its possible with current tech.
In fact thats how realistic water in animated movies is done, probabily
That clip of getting distracted and studying the ground or textures in a game, then someone jumping on you cracked me up. I can relate LOL
I once tried to develop my own game, And I did made one, a Basic car game in a city.
And since then I have developed this massive respect for the game developers and artists who spend so much time to create such beautiful art, It's just very impressive,
and attention to details which a lot of players don't even recognise but those tiny details adds up.
I am a game developer myself and I have to say, realistic water or even just good water is very hard to do. I always struggle with the transition of the camera from over water to underwater and the look from below the water to the water surface. Can you make a more detailed video about those two water topics. It would be a splash! :D
I second opinion
same Problem here. But my Problem is most time to find the Transition Point. Like Tessalation my waves have no real collision Point which i can use for example post processes. Well and since i updated to 4.27 the graphical visualisation is broken when i select some transparent Materials, so i stopped experiment on this for now. So yes this would help greatly
Isn’t it the same with doors, I barely see any game that do doors just right.
@@verbon47 Yes doors are whole nother topic, there is a talk/video just about how hard doors are in video games and why from the developers of The Last of us
found this video while looking up how swimming works in video games, wasn't what I was looking for but it was still pretty interesting!
What the hell dude! This video is just WAY, WAAAAY too short! Super interesting stuff, definitely should make an extended version where you go more in depth! People would definitely be into that!
Since when is 8 minutes too short for a UA-cam video? Be happy with what you got.
I'd love to see it, could listen to this dudr speak for hours lmao.
@@Justfillintheblank I watch 1 hour full documentaries of this stuff or history so... yeah, 10m is a short video to me. I just feel it stopped when it was getting the most interesting!
@@Cless_Aurion I will agree with this one for this video ! I'm a big fan of video essays on things I love and I do love learning about games from other angles !
Ghostcharm has a longer video on the same topic
7:00 I mean, for optimisation the most obvious solution would be to have distant water only use the normal map, using an intensity slider for the vertex displacement shader to provide a gradient between the high-res and low-res water. To minimize calculations, you can have the VDI slider use a coordinate grid instead of going on a vertex-by-vertex basis.
This is what i love about unreal Engine! The nodes and setup for water effects is easy and looks great!
Thank you cyberpunk for allowing people to appreciate the presence of water in games
I was always amazed about the look of water in video games. Like it confused me how it could look so good and not be demanding. Thanks so much for this video
first time i ran sea of thieves i was blown away by how organic the water looked. it just looks right
Was waiting for the parallax section but vector displacements are more sophisticated. Great video.
Id love to see a video further exploring the Sea of Thieves art style. I love the way they have that painterly look but still packed with bunch of detail in color and normal maps. It'd be amazing to see a way to see that style done in substance painter for example!
Thank you for having a Unreal engine course. I am sure it will help me. I'm moving from Unity to Unreal, and I barely knew what I was doing. So I'm sure that it will help greatly.
I think it also should be mentioned how the post processing effects can be used here. When the player goes under the water a blueish tint is added to the color grading. A very simple and very powerful effect.
This is an incredibly made research video. Not too complicated but no to trivial either. Thank you for the content, you earned a new subscriber.
Vertex displacement is a pretty simple concept, what I struggle to understand is how exactly developers match up vertex displacement with physics of the player character and any other things they might be in, such as a ship. It'd be very heavy to check every single vertex induvidually, update the physics position of there a collision of water is so that clearly can't be it.
Would love to get to the bottom of this intruguing achievement.
It is super heavy. I use unity and the collider on a mesh to interact with the surfer in Search For Surf. I have to be very minimal about vertex count and other cosmetics. Basically get it working and then minimize until performance is good.
I doubt it affects the physics much at all. It's probably still treated as a flat plane. Only small scale very noticeable things like gunshots would have to take the vertex displacement into account
I feel like sea of theives has got the best water in any video game from what I've seen
Just come across your channel and it was just what I was looking for, instantly subscribed !
Came here for pretty Sea Of Thieves water imagery, got blessed with gorgeous water imagery of other games too!! (not cyberpunk) 🥰
Super well put-together video! So glad you called out FEAR. That game was impressive on a bunch of technical aspects.
Very nice video !
I am currently doing CFD simulations in Fluent for my engineering degree and i got a random thought of how the hell do games do this in real time. So this was really helpful !
I mostly have a hard time with game reviews like they don't get it how much work goes in to game development. Thank you i enjoyed that one!
TLDR: Plane with a moving material, sometimes animated mesh's with animated materials, buoyancy is usually a volume in the water that reverses gravity, etc. particles from water interaction usually detect when player overlaps or uses line traces, then played particle at impact point. There's your water in a nutshell
Dude, you just helped me out a ton.
I'm a first-time world maker and I've only made a few worlds on vrchat but I've started to go even further by creating stuff outside of vrchat.
Woah that normal map technique for water is really cool and looks super easy to do! I'll definitely have to try that one out!
The ocean in sot is one of the best parts. Nailed it so hard.
Cyberpunk nailed the water physics 🥴
Yeah, nailed it to the ground.
@@CMZneu If only he'd released this video before they fixed the water physics in patch 1.5.
@@SirFrancisBaconn to say its fixed is subjective. the ripples make it look like its made of thick glycerin, the splash particles look straight out of a playstation 1 game. they obviously rushed it, just like everything else.
The dirt rutting throughout the race in MX vs ATV is the first time I ever saw something similar as far as reacting to its environment. Water is finally catching up lol have come a long way
A lot of games don't use vertex displacement for disturbances caused by players, objects, impacts etc. Where it's not obviously vertex displacement, they use a normal map that has a wave that propagates and then layer that on top of the original (or something similar, I haven't implemented such a thing myself yet).
And a note, underwater foliage moving works essentially the same as foliage on land implementation wise.
For anyone interested in more information regarding implementation beyond simple normal textures, I would recommend looking up Gerstner Waves.
2:18 the ball and background are actually really pretty
A little surprised you didn't add some forbidden west in there. Forbidden west nailed water too. The water foam looks fantastic and uses layers to appear 3d instead of just a flat texture. And the different kinds of water look great; murky water, calm lake water, stream to rivers, and of coarse the ocean waves. And it's all adjusted according to the weather at the time.
As someone who tried rendering still photorealistic water in Bleder I'm surprised by how beautiful the water looks in those games you showed. Makes me wonder how do they optimize that to be able to run in real-time.
Years ago I can remember playing Crysis and almost pooping my pants when I noticed the spent shell casings pouring out of the assault rifle, rolling down the rock and colliding with the water making ripples
This channel is something else man.
When it comes to old games that handled water very well, I first think of the Wave Race series. After all, wave is in the title :)
The water in that game blew my mind as a kid, it was one of my first N64 games and riding over those waves and just flailing around in the water made me feel like I was absolutely living in the future, with a game with such realistic water. Looking back now the graphics look primitive but at the time being able to interact with water like that in a 3D environment was incredibly immersive.
Stylized graphics is a beautiful world that people just dont care enough to get into. once they do, there's no coming out.
The water in the old game Outcast was so impressive. The rest of the game struggled because it used voxels but didn't have GPU acceleration yet so it was too slow. I spent plenty of time enjoying the reflection of the sun in the water though.
I play Sea of Thieves quite a bit and I love the water in the game its so beautiful and everytime I get a minute to wait before going to a new island or area I just look out until I get shot by a random player
Cool video! Unfortunate that Wave Race 64 didn't make an appearance. One of its biggest selling points was the "realistic" water physics. I remember being gobsmacked when I saw it the first time.
I don't know anything about making games but this was really interesting, subbed
You just got yourself a new subscriber 🎉
I could watch these types of videos for hours (and probably will...)
Quite surprised you didn't mention The Falconeer though actually.
Great ❤ video. Wave Race Blue Storm (Nintendo GameCube, released in 2001) was a technical masterpiece. Even today the water physics are impressive. NSTC (Nintendo Software Technology Corporation, based in the United States) worked three years in total on the game and two of the three years was spend to create the water effects. They’ve implemented physics from nature so the waves interact in a natural way. It’s stunning and impressive.
I remember having said to my friend how water isn't water a few years ago and explained how it works in Sea of Thieves and he hated me for it and was disgusted by water ever since
The first game that ever impressed me with its water physics that comes to mind is Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance. It was a PS2 game that had vertex displacement for its poles of water when you walked through them.
I thought for a moment that your first few references to Cyber Punk were genuine, and I thought you had lost your marbles. 🤔😂
The idea of the video is cool, but I wouldn't mind a longer video where you explained the techniques in more details. Also, adding resources or explaining what other techniques exist would have helped a lot. Comparing different techniques used in different games and so on..
Wave Race 64 had amazing water physics all the way back in '96, blew my mind back then.
Awesome video Thomas, love the little diss towards Cyberpunk :D
Dang you totally could have tossed in a few more roasts to Cyberpunk. Every transition "like modern games" etc I was expecting it. Glad you tossed in that ending one though lol.
I'm not a multiplayer gamer, but I almost want to play Sea of Thieves just for the water effects alone.
You forgot something very important: all the immersion you created with the procedural vertex displacements, animated normal maps, artificial refraction, & foam particles can quickly be destroyed because the water's surface is visible inside the boat that's supposed to be watertight!
love the jabs at cyberpunk, nice video
cutting edge cyberpunk! you got me there!
Wow, he found a valid compliment for Sea of Thieves! I never thought I would see the day.
Very interesting. Love the light through the waves in sea of thieves and Assassin's Creed
Wave Race Blue Storm (Nintendo GameCube, 2001) was at the time an impressive showcase of water physics in a video game.
Its crazy how back when I was like 10 in games you couldn't even hardly touch the water and everything was set maps and quest instead of open adventure crazy how it's advanced
Really liked this essay style video! keep it up man.
Love the Cyberpunk sarcasm. Lol
So, Yeah...)) I like this in the end of the video )) Sounds so fun
Looking forward to see Star Citizen's iteration on this in their next update
yaaaaaa
Abzu has the most beautiful water ive ever seen
The map, Breeze, in Valorant has a stylistically minimal yet cool looking water. There isn't much happening but there are two layers of textures that move in-sync with each other. The light texture acts like foam waves, and the dark texture below it sticks to the ground, acting like a shadow. In A site, there is a small pool of water that looks real but is literally just a flat texture. The sound effects it has also adds to the illusion. While in the map, Icebox, is where I think they used vertex displacement for the water.
Yeah, I think the water in breeze fits Valorant style. But Icebox? which part of the map are you talking about that has water?
@@abdoreda7126 outside the map. Not sure if it's actually vertex displacement but it's the only water in the fame that has actual form
i love water. thank you for this
The end about Cyberpunk is just the cherry on top 🤣🤣
I'd love to see the Art and Tech of Sea of Thieves :)
Honestly, inwish sea of thieves focused more on gameplay that water physics, on top of that it's only slightly better than wind wakers water physics and that is like a game that 20 years old and for game cube
Very insightful, thank you for sharing.
I love seeing water in games. This is everything to me
Finally UA-cam recommending interesting channels
Now we need a "How Water Works Part II"
Recently found this channel, really interesting!
The clip of Destiny 2 on Titan brought back so many memories.
Minecraft has the funniest water:
1. Fall in a puddle a few inches deep and you don't take any fall damage.
2. Swim up a waterfall.
3. Water Infinitely flows from its source.
About vertex displacement, won't the mesh need a lot of vertices in order to obtain smooth geometry in the waves, but that sounds like it would impact performance significantly.
Keep in mind that displacement can work in tandem with normal maps.
@@coultercrooks7680 Yeah I know that, but even if the normal is displaying a smooth curved surface, the rough edges and sharp corners from geometry is still there.
@@coultercrooks7680 Unless the vertex count of the geometry in current titles are high enough to appear smooth at a normal distance, while low enough to run the game in a playable framerate, then consider my question trivial, I'm just curious whether it's possible to fake a convincing water tide with a low number of vertex count.
There's a technique called "tessellation" which essentially adds extra vertices to a model closer to the camera. So use a large plane as input model, and only around the players camera (where they'll see that detail) does it procedurally become higher poly to make the water smooth. Another technique is using a plane that is higher poly in the center, which will then snap (in a grid) to the player position, so the water essentially follows the player around. This one is especially useful if the water surface is a large (or infinite) ocean, as it just keeps moving with the player no matter how far they travel. Especially the first one is used almost every time you see water (or even other objects like terrain) in modern AAA games, I've seen these two techniques used together as well.
Very informative.
Keep up the good work.
That water looks pretty quenchable
This is awesome. Thank you.
You know what, water _is_ pretty cool!
Bioshock & Bioshock 2 both had some amazing solutions to water graphics.
I watched this high and it changed my life
Looking forward to see what you gather from SoT been looking into it myself passively for quite some time
You got into it yet?
@@owyemen9367 well yeah, there's a bunch principles in the structure of how the water behaves, I'm just curious how the game accurately checks for certain things and how it transitions from stormy seas in certain parts to calmer seas elsewhere
My best guess is that world coords of the sea are able to be multiplied by whatever equation is used for a certain sea behaviour and the area in between Lerps between those states
some video games make you feel like an ant because of how water functions
they look like the character could grab a drop of it and hold it with both of their hands
Water is lovely
It is wet and I like it
Hydration good
Is volumetric shading used in games? It's what makes water look darker the deeper it is, it's what makes vision fall-off when displaying underwater scenes in other CG apllications.
first video of yours I watch... if all your videos are like this then I just fell in love with your channel, have a like and a nice day good sr! :D
I still remember the first time I saw water in Halflife 2 , that blew my mind back then and the physics
Love your work ❤️
I remember in the early 2000 we where always stoked to see new updates to Water. And i also remember the GPU's had a hart time with Tessellation