OpenGL Water Tutorial 1: Introduction

Tutorial series about programming 3D water using OpenGL!

Introduction video to the series!

Common Problems:

-If the edges of the water quad look a bit jagged (especially when you zoom out with the camera) then you may have a problem with the precision of the depth buffer. This can be fixed by increasing the NEAR_PLANE value of your projection matrix in the MasterRenderer, or by changing "new PixelFormat()" to "new PixelFormat().withDepthBits(24)" when creating the display.

End of video music- Kai Engel, "Waking Stars":

[Catherine-hv]

Hey, I finish all your tutorials including the basic series. They are useful and I finish my project thanks to you. Thanks a lot for your sharing.

[Mailliw]

Oh, skipping ahead, I just realized there's another series! Water was one of the first things I would have looked up after the original series, I'm so glad to see you've made one for it :D Can't wait to go through it!

[htechhd]

Yes I was looking forward to this for a long time :D
Good Video

[feliut]

Hah, awesome to find you doing this tutorial. I have been watching your dev log videos for a long time. Now I am doing some research on making water for my little 3D engine and found this ;D

[Yan-mzyh]

This serie looks good! Can't wait for next tutorial !

[ryanclark]

I'm sure you know this, but the transformation matrix doesn't need to be calculated every frame, unless the water is moving for some reason. The same goes for terrains, guis,  and entities that do not move. Using VisualVM I profiled my game, and creating transformation matrices was actually taking a significant amount of processing power. Creating them in the constructor helped reduce the time needed to render everything, and it hardly took any time to implement.

[judicaelclair]

Very nice tutorial, cant wait to watch the next ones!!

[roarkisaacs]

Looks really cool! Thanks for the effort!

[AndySolace]

1 person can't swim?

Liked and favourited - I'm finally getting on to this series :D (New job has been keeping me busy...)

[musahh]

Thank you for a great work. Watched all your videos. Learned a lot. Very helpful!

[rbaleksandar]

Those images for explaining stuff...You have some serious Picasso skills going on there. LOL

Great tutorial!

[asdasfdfgewqgrgyjh]

This Tutorial looks great, and Thank god i don't have to "Translate" your code to C#

[PanCave]

hey, im following your water tutorial or at least im trying to. I worked with the main series. When I add the Watershader (only instanciating it, nothing else is done) it breaks everything and nothing gets rendered. After a good amount of time of debugging i figured out, that the line "programID = GL20.glCreateProgram();" in the ShaderProgram-Constructor is where it breaks. What can i do to fix this? When the line is called it only renders SOMETHING... like a black circle at the bottom and then when i link the program it breaks completly.

[ezetreezy]

I have a different c++ application so how are your vertices being sent to the buffers and being handled in the vertex shader? Your vertices seems to have only one value at each vertex float[] = -1, -1, -1 etc..
In your vertex shader your grabbing the x and y if those positions?
The textureCoords are a bit confusing as well just need a little bit help because i am not following along with your java game tutorials. :)

[SamS-fenv]

Just tidied up my code before starting this Oh my what a mess I'd made!

[gardnerXu]

Thank you very much to make so great tutoials

[wouter]

Could you link the height map youre using for the water?

Thanks!

[marcperlade]

I activate alpha blending, but it does not work... It makes horrible white edges in my water. Does anybody have an idea of what is going on?

[philodoxyassou]

hi i want to buid the exact same thing ? how can i do that i didnt find the other tutorials ( i want a small tiny terrain just like yours ), i know this is just the water section ? can you please orient me ?
thank you

[ryklin]

Can you give us any advice on how to best create the second terrain for the "underground" portion of the scene. The current terrain class we have from the other tutorial series would need some significant editing to handle two types of terrains. I know it's not a focus of this series, but if you can leave a comment pointing us in the right direction to save time, that would be great. For example, did you create a second sun below the ground? Did you nix using blend maps? Did you rotate the second terrain to flip it upside down? Did you use a height map or assign the jagged edges manually>?