Building a Dynamic Water Shader with Campo Santo

Matt Wilde, an artist at Campo Santo has recently published a nice article on the way the team has worked on the announcement trailer of ‘In the Valley of Gods’. The thing is that Matt discussed the production of a scene that didn’t actually make it to the final cut: a scene with Zora and Rashida breaking through an ancient flooded passageway. The scene would feature a nice-looking water, which would react to the motion of the characters and surrounding geometry.

The team’s graphics programmer Pete Demoreuille generated a GPU-based simulation using a “shallow-water” approximation. The simulation accounts for the water’s depth and computes its horizontal velocity along with height. In the end, the artists got a number of dynamic textures which are fed into the shader for the water surface’s height, normal, velocity, and distance from a blocking object. 

Here is a small piece of the article to get you interested: