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Toon Water — Stylized Playground

App: apps/toon_water_demo/

A companion to Water Raymarch — Seascape Playground. Where that app renders the reference water’s realistic look, this one renders its toon look — a faithful port of the owner’s ray-marched renderToonWater onto a real mesh surface (shaders/water_toon.slang). The waves are the same Alekseev |sin|/|cos| octave heightfield (so the buoyant floaters bob on exactly the waves you see); only the shading differs.

The toon shading, ported 1:1 from the reference fragment:

  • a banded depth palette (toonBand) — flat cel steps from a bright shallow tint to a deep blue, with the real seabed showing through the shallows;
  • crisp cel foam (crispStep) at shorelines / object contacts and on the big wave crests;
  • INK graphic marks on steep shadow-facing facets + a dark horizon stroke;
  • banded (stepped) sun light;
  • a toonSky rim reflection with hard cloud ribbons, and a sun-gold broad + hard specular.

As with the Seascape variant, the see-through is the real engine scene (seabed + physics floaters) via the grab-pass + scene depth — so crates and barrels sit in the water with a crisp foam ring at the waterline.

Run from root

Section titled “Run from root”
Terminal window
% ./plume3d toon_water_demo

Controls

Section titled “Controls”
  • W/A/S/D move · Q/E down/up · Arrows or mouse-drag look
  • SPACE spawn a crate · B spawn a barrel (both float + bob via buoyancy)
  • 2 Toon (default) · 1 Seascape (compare the realistic look) · TAB cycle weather (clear/rain/snow/storm) · hold T time-of-day · R reset · ESC quit

What it shows

Section titled “What it shows”
  • A faithful mesh port of a ray-marched toon water look — the cel bands, foam and graphic ink read on real geometry, seeing the real scene through the surface.
  • The same wave field drives the render and the buoyancy, so physics floaters ride the visible swell.
  • One shader, many conditions: the toon water under clear / rain / snow / storm weather (driven by the shared TimeOfDay + Weather content packs) and across the day.
  • Splashes, ripples and precipitation via the particle system. Like its Seascape sibling, the water FX ride the engine’s built-in particle + instancing systems through Scene.draw() — no hand-rolled immediate-mode draws. A floater crossing the surface bursts a flat SpriteGround foam ripple ring + a camera-facing SpriteBillboard splash flash (both pinned decals reusing the sprite pipeline — see Particle FX Demo), and rain / snow are real GPU-instanced 3D geometry (InstancedMesh streak volumes toggled by the Weather driver), replacing the earlier screen-space overlay; overcast states paint the animated cloud sky. The precipitation volume follows the camera (re-snapped to a grid cell each frame) so rain surrounds the diver wherever they fly, and while it precipitates the rain stipples the water — foam ripple rings burst at random points near the camera. The flat ripple rings foreshorten at this near-water camera, so they read as subtle white foam (crisp from above, as in the Particle FX Demo).

The toon palette constants (INK / FOAM / SUN_GOLD) and the foam/band thresholds are the tunable knobs at the top of water_toon.slang.