Realistic Waterfall

A spark of inspiration hit me while watching a youtube video that showed Snoqualmie falls. I really loved the shapes being created by the water and mist coming off the falls and wanted to see if I could replicate these things with my current skillset. It had been a while since I had pursued a personal project with a more realistic focus, so this seemed like a fun challenge.

You can view a more in-depth breakdown of how this project game together here:
https://realtimevfx.com/t/realistic-waterfall-based-on-snoqualmie-falls/31632

This is my main sequence of shots with a few different lighting scenarios and vantage points. Turn on sound if you like Twin Peaks. Colors are actually better at the vimeo link below.

Breaking down the various aspects of the waterfall/river.

These are the primary mesh elements of the waterfall.

This is a breakdown of the overarching material elements for the waterfall columns.

The splash mesh particles initially suffered from ugly polar UV seams. Here I describe how I approached getting rid of the ugliness.

Here I'm demonstrating how I was able to bump up the emissive intensity of the mist in the sunlight while preserving the look of the shadows. Because of the shape of the shadows in this scene, this technique worked really well.

This element ended up getting mostly covered by the mist, which is how things look in reality. However, I was really happy with how this element looked in isolation, so I decided to share it here.

Reference Board.

These are the textures used to make all water related elements. The splashes were composited together from images obtained from unsplash.com. The bottom water normal map is unreal content.

This is another lighting scenario that I thought looked cool, but didn't put in the main video.