VFX_Veteran
Banned
Can you explain to me what light propagating through water is exactly and what I'm supposed to see that's more impressive? Because it kinda looks like your just taking the piss by comparing a shot in broad daylight (AC:BF) to overcast (UC4) and saying that it's missing specular highlights and lights passing through shit when there's no direct light source.
You are right. They are in different lighting conditions. Having said that though, UC4 foam just doesn't look natural to me. I expect more non-uniform foam like this.
Light propagation through water, leaves or anything where light can travel and illuminate wtih out being totally absorbed is a real physical property. You don't want to model light stopping right at the surface of water and then reflecting away immediately. Since water has an index of refraction of 1.33 (air is 1.0 meaning light rays pass right through air without bending). It will pass through and scatter it's light around until finally exiting back out to your eyes. What you see as a result is water that has more light inside of it.
Now in that dark condition, you may see some random pockets of shallow water vs. deep water. But that's nit-picking. My main complaint is seeing that foam. Perhaps it's the noise texture they are using. Or it's hand placed and not really following any kind of real simulation.
As for UC4 vs Ryse: Waterfall Edition, I can't imagine one looking THAT much better than the other. UC4 has the best I've seen to date. Feel free to throw me a native res video of Ryse waterfalls.
They don't look THAT much better. Agreed. I get Ryse in a day or so. I'm sure I'll take pics of it's waterfall. In that GIF I made of Ryse, I like the way it's spraying more water particles away.. it seems more natural to me.
I also noticed the water in the cave. The reflections are too mirror-like to me even though it's being viewed at such a grazing angle. Water should have some roughness to it and doesn't reflect light in a mirror direction for every photon hitting it. This leads me to believe that water material isn't physically plausible or they saved some GPU cycles by doing a mirror reflection to avoid re-rendering the scene just to add a roughness blur to the reflection and projecting it back onto the surface.