Water Shader

The Water Shader is specifically designed to provide a realistic water effect on Terragen surfaces, including wave-shaped displacement, reflectivity, and transparency. Specialized controls are provided to realistically simulate certain water phenomena, for example "wind patchiness".

Waves Tab

Settings

• Roughness: Controls the general roughness of the water surface.
• Wave scale: The average wave size.
• Smallest scale: Determines the size of the smallest details. You may want to decrease this if the water shape looks too simplistic, or increase it if you're only viewing the water from a distance. The smaller this is, the more octaves there are in the Water Shader noise function and the longer render times will be.

• Wind patch effect: In nature, there are variations in wave structure and overall water smoothness across large bodies of water due to wind. This and the next two settings simulate this effect. The "Wind patch effect" setting controls the amount of variation there will be between different areas—effectively the strength of this effect.
• Wind patch size: Controls the average scale of the areas of variation.
• Wind patch sharpness: Sets how sharp the line between areas of variation will be. Put another way, this controls how smooth the transition between areas of different roughness is.

Example movies

Roughness	Wave scale	Smallest scale
Wind patch effect	Wind patch size	Wind patch sharpness

Additional tabs for Water Shader

• Water Shader - Reflections Tab

• Water Shader - Sub-surface Tab

• Water Shader - Seed Tab

Literally, to change the position of something. In graphics terminology to displace a surface is to modify its geometric (3D) structure using reference data of some kind. For example, a grayscale image might be taken as input, with black areas indicating no displacement of the surface, and white indicating maximum displacement. In Terragen 2 displacement is used to create all terrain by taking heightfield or procedural data as input and using it to displace the normally flat sphere of the planet.