Water animation texture

[Josh]

This is pretty cool. I used an AI upsampler to increase the size of my seed texture 2x. Then I generated water animation frames, loaded them all as pixmaps, and saved them as a single DDS volume texture like so:

    auto plg = LoadPlugin("Plugins/FITextureLoader");

    std::vector<shared_ptr<Pixmap> > mipchain;
    auto path = GetPath(PATH_DESKTOP) + "/watermaker/frames";
    for (int n = 0; n < 128; ++n)
    {
        auto pm = LoadPixmap(path+"/water1_" + String(n) + ".png");
        pm = pm->Convert(TEXTURE_BC5);
        mipchain.push_back(pm);
    }
    SaveTexture(GetPath(PATH_DESKTOP) + "/water.dds", TEXTURE_3D, mipchain, 128, SAVE_GENMIPMAPS);

In order to do this, I had to study Microsoft's documentation of the DDS file format layout here:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/direct3ddds/dds-file-layout-for-volume-textures

The texture can be animated automatically just by setting the material texcoords animation on the z axis, so the shader smoothly blends in between the volume texture slices to show the animation. Very simple, in a single texture.

The resulting file is 36 MB, in BC5 format, with mipmaps and 128 layers:

https://github.com/Leadwerks/Documentation/blob/master/Assets/Materials/Animations/water1.dds

[reepblue]

One thing I missed coming from Source was animated textures. Glad we'll have them in Ultra 

[Josh]

Download here: