Underwater reflection from sunlight

Technical & Engine Help Unreal Engine Help
#1

Hi fx guys!

There is another question about underwater reflection. What a best way to simulate reflection from the sun light (dir light) on the underwater surface while camera is underwater? In my case is required approach for UE4 and without using post processing.

May be someone from Naughty Dog can comment how to do this?

There is video of Uncharted 4 game:
https://youtu.be/CWCNWA2HbNk?t=176

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#2

just a thought: to get the effect on the surface, use a cubemap for that spread light.
Also have the plane point down and inverse the light direction for rendering it (would need custom lighting in the material). Might be you got to flip the texture normals for the waves to look right from below.

1 Like
#3

Imo it’s also using Subsurface scattering.

#4

Yeah, eventually. There might be several routes to achieve that same effect.
Would be intersting to see your progress in replicating it.
If you care to share the process, it is easier for people to give hints along the path.

#5

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#6

There is Opacue material with Subsurface color scattering without WPO and with fake specular from the custom light dir vector

#7

that’s pretty close.

  • The gradient in the distance looks vertically aligned rather than horizontally like in the reference. The distant surface towards the corners gets too dark this way, while the deep water looks too bright.
  • I’d say lift up the darkest value the surface is allowed to have. so it appears even more translucent.
  • the normal map looks a bit bumpy, rather than wavy. Try to stretch one UV direction a bit more than the other.

PostProcessing wise you could add some Radial Blur and a bit more Bloom to get even closer