custom water without normalmaps

[UltraProAnti]

I'm thinking of including a swimming pool in the thing I'm working on, so none of the vanilla water materials will be any use (they're all rippling, and I need something totally still). Is a normalmap essential to make the water surface look like something? Has anyone done anything with totally still water in it?

Also, off at a tangent slightly, does moving water (like in the room where you have to swim to the bottom to release those cable drums after flooding the trench thing, after dealing with zillions of manhacks) have to be opaque, as it is there? Or can it be transparent like in Route Canal?

 

[UltraProAnti]

No? Yes?

 

[Xenethyl]

In theory you could create a block of water that looked like a brick wall. The parameter that defines a brush as being water is in the .vmt file for the texture you are using. For example, this .vmt is taken from the dev_water2 texture:

"Water"
{
	"Water_DX60"
	{
		"$fallbackmaterial" "nature/water_dx70"
	}

	"%tooltexture" "dev/water_normal"
	"%compilewater" 1
	"$abovewater" 1

	"$envmap" "env_cubemap"
	"$refracttexture" "_rt_WaterRefraction"
	"$refractamount" "1.0"
	"$refracttint" "[0.95 1.0 0.97]"

	"$reflecttexture" "_rt_WaterReflection"
	"$reflectamount" "1.0"
	"$reflecttint" "[1 1 1]"

	"$scale" "[1 1]"

	"$bumpmap" "dev/water_dudv"
	"$normalmap" "dev/water_normal"

[b]	"$surfaceprop" "water"[/b]
	"$bottommaterial" "dev/dev_waterbeneath2"
	"$bumpframe" "0"

	"$fogenable" 1
	"$fogcolor" "{22 20 10}"
	"$fogstart" 1.00
	"$fogend" 400.00

	"Proxies"
	{
		"AnimatedTexture"
		{
			"animatedtexturevar" "$normalmap"
			"animatedtextureframenumvar" "$bumpframe"
			"animatedtextureframerate" 30.00
		}

		"TextureScroll"
		{
			"texturescrollvar" "$bumptransform"
			"texturescrollrate" .05
			"texturescrollangle" 45.00
		}
		"WaterLOD"
		{
			// fixme!  This has to be here, or material loading barfs.
			"dummy" 0
		}
	}
}

If you read through the code you should be able to understand most of it as most parameters are shortened words from the English language. I have bolded the line you are looking for to determine your brush as water and for it to behave as water (ie. water physics). If you wanted to create water with no animations you would simply have to create a .vmt for your water texture with pretty much everything that is in the .vmt I posted but without the Proxies section. In the Proxies section of the .vmt file the texture is instructed to move and animate. By removing this section of the .vmt you will end up with a textured brush that behaves like water but is not animated. However, I would not suggest creating water without some sort of animation as even swimming pools, when observed closely, present a ripple effect that changes, or animates, over time.

As for moving water being restricted to certain types, there are no restrictions. The water in the level you speak of just happened to be textured with murky water. You could just as easily create moving water with a clear water texture, such as that of the canals.

Hopefully this helps you out with your questions.