Check out our demo video showcasing Triton 2.0′s capabilities:
Triton 2.0 introduces smoothly blended water with your coastlines and high-wavelength waves that slow and grow as they approach the shore. By supplying a floating-point height map texture via the new Triton::Environment::SetHeightMap method, Triton can use your bathymetry data to create realistic water / land transitions. This height data is also used to ensure waves and spray don’t “pop through” low-lying terrain at the shore.
Just pass us a height map texture ID and a matrix to transform world coordinates to your height map texture coordinates, and Triton does the rest. Wave displacements are also dampened as they approach the shoreline, further reducing depth precision artifacts at the water/land boundary.
We’ve been quietly rolling out these new features for the past month or so, and they’re finally polished enough to announce. With Triton 2.0, you can add rotor wash effects from rotary-wing aircraft and helicopters with just a few lines of code. The new Triton::RotorWash class allows you to simulate rotors of any diameter, speed, and orientation. These rotors will create 3D wave displacements with foam radiating out from the intersection of the rotor’s wind and the water surface, together with particle-based spray effects. The Triton::Impact class lets you simulate impacts on the water surface from bullets, torpedos, or anything else – just give it a mass, velocity, position, and orientation, and you’ll get anything from a small splash to a large effect with 3D circular waves emanating out from the impact point.
We’ve fine-tuned the appearance of our ship wakes; in addition to making the 3D Kelvin wake waves more realistic, we’ve upgraded the textures and algorithms behind the propeller backwash effect, spray, and foam effects.
And Lots More…
This is a big release containing lots of smaller fixes and enhancements; the complete release notes are available here. We’ve taken care to keep our API backwards-compatible, so updating should be easy.