How I Made The Water In My Oasis Scene Look Good(ish) - Godot Behind the Scenes!

Water is intrinsic to video games, often enhancing a scene with pretty reflections and ambient movement, bringing an otherwise static environment to life. In today's 'Behind the Scenes!' I discuss one simple way to implement a good-looking water shader in Godot Engine, and discuss a few general tips to make any 3D game scene look good along the way.

As always this Godot tutorial is made in Godot Engine 3.5, but the principles of how this was made could be applied to Unity, Unreal, really any 3D game engine.

Thanks for watching. And please let me know what you'd like to see next!
Beau

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#gamedev #godotengine #desert #water #oasis #dune #indiegame
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Timestamps:
0:00 Intro
0:16 Inspiration
0:46 Getting wet
1:18 Detail from randomness
2:22 That one line of shader code you might want to modify (wave movement)
2:48 Fancy reflections
3:05 Tricks to make 3D look good
4:18 Sand Worms
5:00 Why can't I just learn this
5:20 My actual face
5:35 Rambling on about Godot
8:25 Closing

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Godot Engine Logo Copyright (c) 2017 Andrea Calabró

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[alexkt]

That's a beautiful scene by the way.

[owenomc]

I love the game Dev process, such a difficult journey. I am starting mine with a computer science class in school and am working on my own small games

[whilefree]

Awesome scene. Great points. Nice video. I enjoyed every second of it. Thanks.

[Kukatoo]

Really appreciate the breaking down of your scene. Great video!

[Nevarek_]

Self-taught indie dev here, too. I want to go beyond greyboxing, your videos helps a lot. Only formally trained in coding, really. It doesn't get you very far, I'd argue art and lighting is much more important. Depends on the game, sure, but for solo indie projects? Let's be real, art is going to be 80% of the project. Plus lots of code is based on the art, so art becomes inevitable. Thanks for teaching me how to make my art not look bad.

[Mysda_]

I really like that you makes 3D looks possible, great videos

[AstroTechGuy]

This is a very helpful and well(!) narrated video. Well done.

[Thomas_Lo]

Very inspiring. I feel like am you, just about two years behind. Maybe not as much. I done gamedev as a hobby on and off for years. More off than on. And my current day job doesn't leave much wiggle room. My son is just 10 and already running laps around me in Godot. My only advantage is already being a trained dev with a degree. Enough about me, just saying all these things aloud to keep myself engaged. So thanks again for this inspiring video and now you have one more subscription!

[lynx-xh]

thank you a lot for this video. It was really helpful!

[MuteObserver]

Incredible tutorial -thanks for working on it ^^

[Zakaros]

You are genius! Hope to see more talented game devs using Godot, so the engine could improve its reputation a bit, because lot of people perceived it mostly as a 2d game engine

[_gamma.]

This was a good video! It really makes me want to make one of these scenes myself

[Smaxx]

Just as a random idea for the worm for next time: I think the best way to approach this would be taking a page of the classic 2D console games playbook and add the individual worm segments in the game, then just let them follow each other. While this might lead to a bit less smooth shape overall (I bet this could be countered with some vertex shader magic), it's probably way easier and better looking than that Blender thing, that failed.😉

[Smaxx]

5:00 basically describes why that 3D game I have in mind for years still hasn't materialized. It would most likely look like a giant 3D turd flipflopping around a 3D scene…

[Zurpanik]

What a great video and great message! I just moved over to Godot from Unity and am never going back, even if the software paid me to make projects in it. Once I got going, the tool and featureset is pure metal compared to Unity's confusing triangle dinging. There are some really cool things in Unity but I can't wait to see bigger games with Godot!

[BloodPact]

What a cool "sand storm" shader. Can you make video about it or may be link for the source? It's exactly what i needed for my small project

[NycroLP]

Proximity fade seems to be very effective in combating the seam problem. But in many new games I dont see it being used. I wonder why. Is it because of performance?

[JoeySavage]

I know how to create a full game now it took me 3 long years to learn now I got it my main engine Godot

[kevinfishburne]

Your ramble was pretty damn profound, from someone who's been making games as a hobby and following the industry since the late 80's. Blaming an unbroken tool for a shoddy job is like blaming an unbroken controller for getting your ass kicked in SFII: a classic excuse for ineptitude. An artisan will create beauty with the most primitive of tools, and a hack will create excrement with the most advanced of tools. quality = time * resources * skill

That being said, I'd like to briefly ramble about "realistic" 3D graphics. The only reason indie devs ever had a chance at decently realistic 3D graphics was because, to date, they're pretty bad when compared to reality. We just don't realize it because we're used to it, and the latest and greatest that amazes us, despite looking like shit compared to reality, is better than what we were used to previously and therefore temporarily spectacular. For an indie game with "realistic" graphics, the user would just assume it was an older game. In the beginning graphical leaps were incredible, but it's long been diminishing returns and so the indie vs. AAA studio graphical gap is getting smaller. The reality vs. AAA game graphics gap, however, will never close completely using traditional rendering pipelines and technologies, but will within the next decade when GANs/"AI" are refined and hardware-supported enough that they can render real time, fed by game asset data. That kind of processing power will be server farm driven, with the indies last in line, and more or less indistinguishable from the 100+ million dollar films the GANs were trained on.

Since there's nothing any of us can do about the inevitable bizarre future of game graphics, I can only suggest that indies NOT go for photorealism in their graphics. It is art, after all, and most of the time realism in graphic art is not just boring, but defeats the entire purpose. I've said before, "If I want realistic trees, I'll just go outside."

Anyway, your video was awesome...had me laughing. Godot is amazing, in execution, in fundamental design, and in the spirit of free software.

[sweettea-hvls]

What if I want to add a paint tool for a player to draw lakes or rivers? How can it be made in runtime?