Hello everyone,
I’ve been working on this effect for a little bit now, and I’m not 100% satisfied with it. I’m going for a cartoony looking Oil pouring kind of look for some visual interest in our level environments.
Anyway, here is a video of what I have so far, I would really love to here what anyone has to say about where I should go.
Thank you!
While it’s not bad, I’d say this needs a bit more work.
Oil flow tends to be a lot slower in general, so that would be the first thing I would change on it. I would also keep the body of the fluid intact (you’re masking out parts, which could be good, but you’re using a thin-like texture, which do not resemble oily behavior at all. Oil tends to stick into larger blobs, instead of thin parts liek you have now).
The vertex offset for the body of the fluid looks okay imo.
Keep up the good work!
I’d look at updating the normals along with the vertex displacement. Doesn’t have to be perfect, just needs the reflections to not stay “in place”.
Presumably you’re using a sine panning over the UVs to generate the displacement. A cheap approximation would be to generate a normal map with a cosine, using:
normalize(float3(0, cosine(time) * scale, 1))
(That assumes you’re panning along the y)
Yeah you’re right, the others on my team made the same remark of it being too fast, so I slowed it down and used a new mask to make it look more bloby and just that alone made a huge difference.
So thank you for the tips!
I should have thought of using a normal map sooner, made a huge difference as well.
Alright I took your advice into consideration and I think that it made a very significant improvement to the effect! I am 86% more satisfied with it.
Here it is!
Thank you both very much!
Looks way better than the first post.
Superb work 
Loved the progress so far.
Maybe it can be a little thinner in the end?
Thank you both!
Yeah I will have to set it to be able to do that too, I hadn’t considered that yet.
Vertex offset is a good approach. However, symmetric offset is unnatural. How about adding noise?
Oh yeah, that’s a good point, now that I’m looking at it with that in mind it does look really unnatural. I will add that as well. I will update once I put it into a level in my game.
So hopefully someday soon lol, thank you for the tip!