Jailbreak: Source

You’ve just played Bioshock… Wandering through the underwater streets of Rapture, you’re amazed by how effective the water shaders are that line the walls, creating a shimmering, warping effect that makes it seem like you’re under the sea… and now you want to know how to achieve that effect in Source. Good news. It’s possible, and here’s how.

Firstly, you’ll need two programs, which if you’ve been following this blog you’ll already have, but if you’ve arrived here via Google, download them below and follow the installation instructions given:

• NVidia’s Normal Map Plugin
• Nem’s VTF Photoshop Plugin

Boot up Photoshop, and create a blank canvas, 512 x 512 in size. Use the Cloud Filter with white and light blue (or any colours), and create a nice looking effect similar to below:

Now you’ll need to use the Offset Filter (described in the Tiling Textures tutorial) to make the texture tile perfectly for when we animate it later. Save this texture as underwater_glass.vtf using Nem’s VTF plugin and drop it into a “textures” directory in your materials folder of your mod. Now go to Filter; NVidia Tools; NormalMapFilter.

A window will appear, this is the NVidia Normal Map Filter plugin, and it allows you to create Normal maps for your textures. Use the following settings to create a second texture based on the first.

Once done, add a Gaussian Blur from Filter; Blur; Gaussian Blur.

Adjust it to look similar to this:

Save this file as “underwater_glass_normal.vtf” using Nem’s plugin and change Template in the window that opens to “Normal Map”.

Go back to your original file again, and open the NVidia Normal Map Filter again (Filter; NVidia; NormalMapFilter). This time we’re going to create a DuDv map, so use the settings below to create it:

The result should look like the image below:

Save this file as “underwater_glass_dudv.vtf” and change the Template setting to “DuDv”. Now you need to create a single VMT file using Notepad to control how the texture works. So open up Notepad and paste the following code inside, which includes fallbacks when using older versions of Direct X.

Save the file as “underwater_texture.vmt” and include the quotation marks to ensure it saves as a VMT file and not a TXT file. Now just load up Hammer, and place your texture where you want it! Once you’re happy, compile your map and check it out in game! If all has gone well, it should look like this, only better as it’s actually moving and refracting the objects behind it!

Now you’ve just got to promise me you didn’t steal the images directly from this tutorial and use them! It’s far more fun to do it yourself!