Any way to change the "fully opaque" water transition depth in TANE? (Why does my TANE SP4 have volumetric water??)

BraselC5048

Active member
I've got a log pond on my route where it's pretty important that the water is transparent over the entire thing. But it also needs enough depth, and it's seemingly over that which causes the water in TANE to go completely or almost completely opaque. I cloned the "calm water" asset, here's the config:

kind "water2"
username "Calm"
trainz-build 4.2
wave0-magnitude 1
wave0-scale 6,8
wave0-speed 0.001,0.02
wave1-magnitude 1
wave1-scale 5,7
wave1-speed 0.002,0.005
water-opacity 0.5
specular-power 60
water-texture-kuid <kuid:523:19723523>
reflection-lighting-strength 0.6
category-class "EW"
kuid <kuid:-1:6353>

obsolete-table
{
0 <kuid:-1:8009>
1 <kuid:-1:110015>
2 <kuid:-1:101293>
}
username-fr "Calme"
username-es "Tranquila"
username-it "Calma"
username-cz "Stojatá"
username-nl "Rustig"
username-pl "Spokojna"
username-de "Ruhig"
username-hu "Nyugodt"
username-jp "穏やかな水"

thumbnails
{
}
username-pt "Calmo"

kuid-table
{
0 <kuid:523:19723523>
}


---------------------------------------------------------------
There aren't any files in the asset besides the config. The water texture is just an ordinary normal map texture. I tried turning specular-power and reflection-lighting-strength way down, and the water-opacity to 0.05 and also to 0, but the transparent-opaque transition depth doesn't increases past perhaps 0.1, and I could use another 2-4 meters. Is there something I'm overlooking in the config for the asset, is there a setting somewhere else (or dependent on some other settings), or is it simply hardcoded with no way to change it? (I can't find any config file in the game's folders, so I haven't been able to look that over.)

Thanks.
 
@BraselC5048

The 6 wave tags govern mesh transformations during animation.
Specular adjusts shininess on each waves high points.
Opacity adjust surface transparency.
Reflection lighting strength adjust reflection light strength.

Since TANE water is just an animated flat mesh, there are no settings for general opacity relative to distance from shoreline

To achieve a sense of depth you need to texture the terrain that's underwater to achieve (not very well?) that effect.
I made a few "underwater" solid color textures, green and blue to use to simulate deep waters.
Medium green for shorelines, and dark green for deeper.
Same for the blue.

To truly have water that has depth color variation, we would need the devs to implement a Volumetric water model, I think.

This may not answer your question, of course, just my two cents :)


Rico
 
@BraselC5048

The 6 wave tags govern mesh transformations during animation.
Specular adjusts shininess on each waves high points.
Opacity adjust surface transparency.
Reflection lighting strength adjust reflection light strength.

Since TANE water is just an animated flat mesh, there are no settings for general opacity relative to distance from shoreline

To achieve a sense of depth you need to texture the terrain that's underwater to achieve (not very well?) that effect.
I made a few "underwater" solid color textures, green and blue to use to simulate deep waters.
Medium green for shorelines, and dark green for deeper.
Same for the blue.

To truly have water that has depth color variation, we would need the devs to implement a Volumetric water model, I think.

This may not answer your question, of course, just my two cents :)


Rico
Ironically, it seems I do have some sort of volumetric water, and would like to turn it off. The behavior you described it as in older versions, and is what I would like to have. Instead my water looks like this: (absolutely no textures have been added, it's entirely default grid):

1QyD9En.jpeg


I only downloaded the installer I used in May of this year. All the patches the game would automatically show as existing were installed. It shows as Build 105766. (Trainz-build is 4.5) The screenshot had water effects set to high and post-processing set to low. I was looking through older threads to see if it came up before, and it seems that confusions from different user's water working differently has happened before. It's strange I can't find any config file for TANE showing user settings and such; surely there must be one, and perhaps there's a line that toggles it in there?
 
Well, hopefully another Trainzer will know what the heck is going on with your TANE install.

@BraselC5048 - I made a quick clip for you. Shows my log dump pond with the two green underwater textures applied and blended into the shoreline PBR textures (johnnyc1)
Pardon the soundtrack. I'm listening to a concert on YouTube. It's the crowd going crazy after a song ☺️
Just so you can see how effective they can be.




Rico
 
Well, hopefully another Trainzer will know what the heck is going on with your TANE install.

@BraselC5048 - I made a quick clip for you. Shows my log dump pond with the two green underwater textures applied and blended into the shoreline PBR textures (johnnyc1)
Pardon the soundtrack. I'm listening to a concert on YouTube. It's the crowd going crazy after a song ☺️
Just so you can see how effective they can be.




Rico
Those are pretty much traditional model railroad methods. Interesting idea applying them to Trainz. Fixing the depth-related problems turned out to be as simple as turning water effects from high to ultra. But now the trestle used results in pretty ugly reflections. (Bright squares from between the crossbeams in the deck.) Now I'm wondering how to disable or reduce the amount of reflection while keeping water effects on high! (Turning post-processing off didn't do it.)
 
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