Does anyone know what governs the fading out of objects in deeper water? I'm hoping to apply this effect onto an object I'm working on.

I.e. example here of a rock at various depths.



Thanks!

You mean you'd like to get that effect outside of the water? Because I don't think the object itself - the rock - has much to do with it.

Not quite- here's an example of another rock, placed at the same depths. You can see that the fading effect doesn't appear on it.



I'm trying to see if I can apply the water depth effect onto an object in the water that doesn't have the effect.

I wonder if it is something that is layered like the sky's colorramps, but in the second one it just shuts completely too early. Strange how it can be different according to objects, it doesn't look promissing to me, but as I have no clue. It could be in the object of the distant terrain, and it's such a big object too, it could be worth while fixing it.

I didn't think about that, but I might have the same kind of problem with my DT for another big project I'm working on.

I dont know if this will help you, but I recognized, that there are stones that are specialzed for water. Other objects are not affected by the water murk/fog.
You could easily test this in caw with for example the beachwaterstones vs beachstones.
I think it has to do with the object.

And the nonfading is not fading too early - it´s the terrain or the stone "dipped" in the terrain.

I definitely think it has to do with the object as well. The reason I'm asking about this is in regards to a distant terrain object that I'm including in the world.

Right now, it's acting like the second object- no fade underwater (the rock is clipping through the seabed). That means that it sticks out even underwater.

I'm trying to turn it into the first object- which fades underwater. If anyone knows where the right keys might be for instance, it would be of great help!

One idea I have- it might work to clone the rock that has the effect, and replace the mesh and texture with that of the distant terrain?

Can you tell me the name (preferably the internal one) of the 2 rocks you used in the pictures? Are they from BG?

Could have anything to do with the fact that (unless the screenshots are deceiving me) the second one seems much
bigger and it's not completely underwater (or at least not as deep as the first one)?

The first rock (showing the depth effect) is the Ranch Rock from Pets. I have also confirmed that all the rocks from Pets have this effect.

The second rock (without the depth effect) is Rock - Medium - Egypt 1, from World Adventures. I have also confirmed that none of the rocks from the base game have this effect.

Both rocks were submerged at the same spot in the world.

The only anomaly I found in the OBJDs is that, even if both use version 16,
the rock from Pets lacks - in the CommonBlock - the two fields:
. IsPlaceableOnRoofs
- IsVisibleInWorldBuilder (I guess this is not CAW, but the EditTown tool to place trees and other stuff outside lots)

Comparing the MODL/MLOD I found something that may be relevant:
- the WA rock uses the OutdoorProp shader
- the Pets rock uses the LandMark shader
I don't know how that stuff work but I hope this can help you.

Interesting, do you know where I can change the values? Is it the values in the ChunkEntries RCOLBlock category?

Thanks for the tip! Here's hoping it works!

Yep, it's in the ChunkEntries but I don't think you can change that from there with S3PE.
I mean, you can change the shader from there of course, but not the settings of the shader/material
(the LandMark shader has a bigger number of options and I don't think you can add them with S3PE).

Take the following with caution, I don't know what I'm talking about.
This is what a tutorial to make glass materials says, I tried to imitate that.

I think you can extract the meshes (MODL and MLOD, not the shadows of course),
then you decompile them (one at a time) with S3 Obj Mesh tool by Wesley Howe,
edit one of the human readable text files generated, it should be one with the extension
.mtlsrc, replacing the settings (the whole content of the file) with those of the other rock
(this too extracted and decompiled). Then recompile the mesh and import back on the package.

Not sure if this is the best or quickest way (or even if you can simply use the same settings
of the other rock without any other adjustment needed).

What if I were to clone one of the rocks and replace the mesh and texture? I'm wondering it that would be a simpler solution.

Hmm, changing the value to LandMark shader seems to turn the object into a glowing red object.

It was the WA shader you wanted to keep wasn't it? the Outdoor Prop one?

The shader I wanted to keep was from Pets.