Zoo 2: Animal Park (Water Enclosure)
These are some steps and the result of the water-enclosure in the mobile game Zoo2: Animal Park. Here I was responsible for defining the water-enclosure style, the concept, mesh and texture. Our programmers made the shaders possible.
It was a very interesting process to figure out the solutions with my colleagues of art, coding, animation and gamedesign. We wanted the result to be of course both: good looking and performant. I tried to combine all possible things to give the best impression of water without having actual volume etc.:
- Waving water surface
- A seperate waving waterline and waves near the border
- To create more depth, the texture on the inside gehts more dark blue, the deeper it is
- "Fake caustics" on the texture, which are animated by the shader
- Plants, also animated by the shader, to pretend that they are moved and distorted by the water
The left concept has been done first, but it has not been used, because we decided we'd need more hight for a nice animal animation. So the right concept was the outcome.
The enclosure is made of parts, which are put together in the game.
Final props with shaders applied.
Water and glass had to remain rather light and transparent, so that one can see the animals behind/beneath it.
Closeup beneath the waterplane: Soft wobbling plants and "fake caustics"