Hey everybody, I'm on a project where we are rendering a large-scale pacific island scene, and I'm currently focused on the ocean/surf water and the way it interacts with the light. After searching for some inspiration, I found a game the best exhibits both the scale and complexity of what we're going for: Black & White 2. Below are some gamespot links to some screens that I thought showed this best- Screen1 Screen2 I picked this becuase it has all the right interactions, and it also isn't trying to reinvent the wheel or do something that would require an enormous amount of processing ( like FFT or displacement mapping ). My project has to look good, but also be available to a range of platforms. Also, most of the white papers or implementations I've seen focus more on doing wave algorithms, that look great from close up, but as you get to the perspective I want, noticably tile and aren't worth all the overhead it takes to simulate the waves. My understanding of doing water like this is the following - Render a plane of arbitrary dimensions, Normal Map, scrolling the texcoords to simulate surface waves ( dynamic )Cubic Environment Map with fresnel calculations Apply an alpha to each pixel based on linear distance between water vertex and underwater terrain vertex. I'm no expert but thats about all I can see ( with the exception of some nice shoreline-particles ). My problem is, any attempt to bumpmap the water results in pretty horrific tiling that looks terrible as you look into the distance. I've tried doing fading mipmaps, but that doesn't seem to have a good effect either. ( God this post is becoming longer than I intended. Sorry :( ) Anyway, from looking at the screens, and keeping simplicity in mind, is there any avenue that anyone can reccomend? Is there something you see going on with B&W2's rendering that maybe I don't? I'm willing to try just about anything. Thanks. Any help is greatly appreciated. -WP

The intensity of the bump map should fade to nothing pretty quickly to avoid the tiling issue.