How to create a sea/ocean?

[fresan]

I would like to create a sea/ocean that continues to the "horizon", do you have any suggestions for how to do that?

A naive idea is to make a brush that is positioned relative to the viewer, like the skybox is, and cover it with an ordinary water texture. In this way the viewport would always be at the center of the water brush and the borders of the "sea" would hopefully be sufficiently far away to be invisible. Is it possible to do that?

Any other ideas?

[blacksmith123]

Actually, I've had this idea and tried to make a water brush connect to one in the skybox, but the texture scaling is always wacky. I think there are actually props that you can use in the skybox.

[Naurgul]

Wouldn't making the water texture 16 times smaller for the skybox solve this? Except if there is a texture for skybox oceans. :p

[DarthCento]

Ive done it before, just by connecting a brush in the map with one in the skybox like black smith said, and that worked for me, blacksmith, you may have misplaced your sky_camera. Anyway, it was done in HL2 lost coast, decompile it.

[fresan]

Im rather new to this.. What do you mean with "connecting a brush in the map with one in the skybox"? Lets assume I have a skybox and a water brush that fits the skybox, how to connect these two such that the engine consider the water brush to be part of the skybox?

[witalldonebefor]

The skybox enlarges. So, find out how large it gets. And compare, and resize.

[DarthCento]

what i would do is place the sky_camera in the actual map then make water around the water you already have, select the outer water and the sky_camera, drag them out of the playable area then scale them down to 1/16 their size(Ctrl+M brings up transformation window).

[blacksmith123]

Yeah, what darth said, but here's (http://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/3d_skybox) a bit more in-depth on skyboxes.

[fresan]

Actually, i tried to add the water in a 3D skybox following that instruction, but the water did not render correctly so I assumed that only "static materials" could be used in a 3D skybox. Maybe i did some misstake, will try it again. Thanks!

What do you think about the idea of adding a very large water brush? If it is sufficiently large the borders would not be visible. Will the engine handle this efficiently, problems with clipping planes etc ?

[cubedude89]

a 3d skybox would be the best way to make a large body of water.

but the water did not render correctly

Make sure you scale down the water .0625 in the texture editor when adding it to the 3d skybox

1/16 = 0.0625