3D Pixel Art Water Effect with Pulsing Lines

Okay, so you’re diving into this cool water effect and wanna keep those lines nice and sharp, right? So here’s a few ideas to get started:

1. Render with a Shader

To create those white horizontal lines in your shader, you might wanna use a simple sine wave function to control their opacity. Something like this:

uniform float time; // keeps track of animation time
varying vec2 vUv;

void main() {
    // Control the frequency and amplitude of the pulses
    float pulse = sin(time + vUv.y * 10.0) * 0.5 + 0.5; 
    // Positioning the lines
    float lineWidth = 0.01; // Adjust based on your pixel size
    float isLine = step(lineWidth, abs(fract(vUv.y * 10.0) - 0.5)); 
    vec3 color = vec3(1.0); // White lines
    gl_FragColor = vec4(color * pulse * isLine, 1.0);
}
    

2. Keep It Pixel-Perfect

To ensure those lines are always 1 pixel wide, you might use screen space coordinates. A simple trick is to calculate the desired width in relation to the screen’s resolution:

float lineWidth = 1.0 / resolution.y; // 'resolution' being your screen height
    

3. Avoid Anti-Aliasing

You’ll want to set the filters on your textures to nearest neighbor, and if you’re using something like WebGL or OpenGL, turn off antialiasing in your setup.

4. Use Textures for Positioning

If you’re exploring the voronoi texture, it’s really cool for random patterns! You could map this texture’s RG channels to UVs, using the alpha for opacity manipulation. Kinda like:

vec4 voronoiTex = texture2D(voronoiTexture, vUv);
float isLine = step(0.5, voronoiTex.a); // Using alpha for line visibility
    

5. Stay in View-Space

Yeah, doing it in view-space makes sense! Just make sure your UV coordinates get updated with the camera movement, but keep everything relative to your viewport size. That way the lines stay consistent as you move.

6. Experiment!

Lastly, don’t be shy about tweaking numbers. Mess around with frequencies in the sine function or the pulse speed; you’ll find a rhythm that feels right. And for a bit of flair, try adding some randomness to the line position!

Hope this helps you out! Good luck nailing that pixel art vibe!