Version 3.05 of the Triton Ocean and 3D Water SDK now has an option to apply propeller wash (AKA turbulent wake) effects on a per-pixel basis, instead of per-vertex. This leads to smoother prop wash effects, at a small performance cost.

To enable this effect, open up the Resources/Triton.config file, and set per-fragment-prop-wash to “yes”. Alternately, you can tie this effect to the ocean quality setting (see Ocean::SetQuality()) by setting auto-per-fragment-prop-wash = yes. In that case, per-fragment turbulent wake effects will kick in automatically if the ocean quality is set to “better” or “best.”

When prop wash is computed per-vertex, it means that the texture coordinates for the effect are only computed on vertex boundaries of the underlying water mesh. This could lead to texturing anomalies near the edges of the effect, that could manifest themselves as an odd stair-step edge on the prop wash. By computing the texture coordinates for each fragment instead, these anomalies go away.