Terrain, Water and flickering problems...

[Brandon]

In my program I am having a big problem with how the water interacts with the terrain.  For some reason it flickers quite a bit, and I'm not sure why.  I hope the attachment is clear enough in showing what's going on.  If not, I can upload a bigger video to my website.

[jviper]

Looks like Z-fighting due to lack of available precision. You may have to decrease your far plane so you can make your near plane smaller.

[Brandon]

Thanks for the help.  Right now I have it setup like so:

Code:

Camera.SetViewFrustum 60, 300000

Is that too big?  It appears that the nearPlane defaults to 1. The flickering really goes haywire when I set the nearPlane to 0.1

[Brandon]

What you said is working.  This is what I changed

Code:

Camera.SetViewFrustum 60, 300000.05, 26.032

And it's making a tremendous difference!
Thanks!

[arnienet]

With the near and far plane it's a good idea to use values close to what you need in the scene. Many people use 1 unit in a 3D scene to represent 1 meter in actual reality. So with the far plane, the setting of 300000 would equate to 300 km and using 26.032 for the near plane fixes the problem by allowing the Z buffer to differentiate between the water and land mesh intersection in your scene. 26.032 means though that the camera would not see anything less than 26m in front of it.

I suspect your meshes are scaled up to a large value and these values are fine if you want to work in that scale (but even scaling up by ten, you would be using a far plane of 30km, near plane of 2.6m).

I suggest you scale down your meshes to a size that more closely represents 1 unit = 1 meter and use a far plane of 2000 to 3000 (2-3km) and a near plane of 0.5m to 1m. This would remove any ambiguity in the dev process. Also use similar values to move the camera around.