Why I Love Pip visits a water museum.
Making waves and breaking ripples.
There’s a water library I like to visit and a water library I dream of visiting. The one that I dream of is Vatnasafn in Stykkishólmur, Iceland. It’s an art installation by visual artist Roni Horn—a collection of melted ice from glaciers laid out in 24 glass columns in a former library. You buy tickets to the Library of Water from the nearby Volcano Museum. I’ve wanted to go for ten years. The one I can get to regularly is called v r 3. It’s an exhibition of different water shaders you can browse, and you’ll find it as a digital download created by Pippin Barr. As he explains the idea:
“Water is perhaps the archetypal technology we use to assess how ‘good’ a game engine or game is in terms of realism, a kind of benchmark. I liked the idea of a speculative future in which, rather than playing a game with water in it, people would choose to simply contemplate the water itself as an activity. Thus vr3 represents a museum/gallery experience where the audience pays attention to water.”
One of the buildings you encounter is dedicated solely to different examples of the Unity game engine’s own water shaders. Each sits within a grey cubic basin with information about the refraction color, clipping, wave scale, and more as a museum-style placard. The other building is for third-party water you find on the Unity Asset Store, and offers wilder variation.
By taking water shaders out of their game context, Barr makes the work of creating the right type of water apparent. At the back on the right of the official Unity room is a container of oscillating red liquid— maybe something you’d use for a cistern tainted by blood. Towards the middle of the room is a glossy, sky-blue liquid where the surface motion implies a current—this one’s better suited to a slow summer river.
In the third-party room is an option that’s jet-black and unmoving. Two basins away is a shader so unruly it won’t stay within its vessel. Deko’s Animated Water Texture reflects sunlight streaming through the game’s window off ragged ocean swells, while Ciconia Studio’s Cartoon Water Shader is flat—a handful of translucent layers moving over one another to give the illusion of rippling caustics.
unruly exhibits
Barr ran into problems while trying to bend these waters to his will. One water came with a ready-made version scaled to be the size of a lake, and in scaling it down for the basin cube it broke because the parameters worked on the assumption the body of water would be large. “This water ‘wants’ to be a lake, and I want it to be a puddle,” is how he put it. One water ignored his scaling completely and flooded the gallery by rendering to the horizon anyway.
It’s from these visits that other thoughts tend to flow. One visit reminded me of the way The Sims 4 players make waterfalls. They hide multiple fountain jets in rocks so you see sections of the spray and not the jet nozzle. By layering enough of them you give the impression of water cascading down surfaces.
Another visit prompted a thought about Scanner Sombre by Introversion. You fire dots at surfaces to render them visible, but those that land on the water dissolve. The way you see the water is either as an absence of dots or as a reflective surface offering a blurry mirror for dots that have landed elsewhere.
vr3 isn’t the only way you can digitally isolate water, it’s just a favorite of mine. If you’re more into playing and shaping, I’ll leave you with a couple of digital water toy recommendations. A simple prospect is David Li’s Waves— a square of ocean you can reshape and rescale using sliders. For something more in-depth there’s Seascape by Alexander Alekseev. It’s lovely to fiddle with in-browser via Shadertoy, tweaking variables as the camera glides across the sea surface.
It’s from these visits to
vr3 that other thoughts tend to flow