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Reflective Water

By Pilchardo

How to ensure that water in your PeTI maps is properly reflective.

Non-reflective water looks bad and will impact on the aesthetics of your map. This simple guide will tell you how to guard against it.

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Created by

Pilchardo
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Category: Modding or Configuration

Languages: English

Posted

Updated

10 Feb, 2013 @ 1:29pm

18 Feb, 2013 @ 3:15pm

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6	Current Favorites

Guide Index

Overview

Introduction

The Simple Solution

The Advanced Solution

Acknowledgements

Comments

Introduction

Have you ever created a map in the PeTI and discovered that your water isn't reflecting its surroundings and looks solid and drab as a result? Something like the screenshot below? It's a frustrating problem that isn't mentioned anywhere in the editor. Fortunately, there are a couple of ways to tackle it.

Nasty water that doesn't reflect its surroundings

The Simple Solution

Keep all water in your map on the same vertical level.

That's right - it's as easy as that.

Putting water on multiple levels like in the example shown on the right will result in the awful solid-looking water that we're trying to avoid.

Keeping all water on the same level will ensure that it correctly reflects its surroundings.

Correctly reflecting water

The Advanced Solution

There is a way to have nicely reflective water at multiple heights in your test chamber. I explain how in part 2 of this guide:

http://cs2bus.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=128122509

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to:

toncica, Mevious and everyone else in this thread[forums.thinkingwithportals.com] for the solution
Aj1t1 for the GIMP reflection tutorial[gimp-tutorials.net]

6 Comments

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wildgoosespeeder 2 Aug, 2015 @ 7:31pm

Actually, I never noticed that. Reflections are expensive anyways. This may be a good trick to stop reflections where you don't want them.

Pilchardo [author] 18 Feb, 2013 @ 3:17pm

Updated with a more complete solution to the problem.

Sunroses 14 Feb, 2013 @ 3:07pm

But the river of slime runing under your entire test chamber thing has been explored before...

Sunroses 14 Feb, 2013 @ 3:06pm

Yeah, but it means that you can't put water on top of another test chamber, for example.

Pilchardo [author] 14 Feb, 2013 @ 2:41pm

The simple answer is "I don't know". The longer answer is that there may be a way using env_cubemaps and/or water_lod_control entities in Hammer (as mentioned in the thread I've linked to) but I'm afraid I don't know any more than that. I have played around with both of those a little bit but haven't got anywhere.

I think keeping it all on one level is a decent solution and can actually work quite well from a level design point of view as, if you join up any separate bodies of water in your map, it becomes almost like there's a river of slime running beneath your entire test chamber.

Sunroses 14 Feb, 2013 @ 2:20pm

Is there any way to fix without having it all on the same level?

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