   Basic Water Surface?
  Well, I'm making pretty nice progress with my D3D engine. Much better (and quicker developing) than I had expected.But now I'm just gathering some information about things I'd like to implement into the engine later on. I have seen a lot of games that include water, whether it be very nice looking, or something simple that is just there for show.I was wondering if anyone had could give me some information, links, pseudo-code, etc., about creating basic water; static, not animated, for now. It doesn't HAVE to include reflections/refractions and things like that, but it'd be nice eventually. I have never really found much on water. But could I use a vertex and/or pixel shader, or should I save that for animated water? =)I just want some small, random waves on a plane. That's all. Maybe build a vertex/index buffer and create so many spans along the width and "height" of the water, and generate random height values using trig. functions? Would that work for basic water?Sorry if this is a dumb question. LoL. I don't really know much about it, so I thought I'd ask. =)Thanks in advance,    Matt U.   
  Rendermonkey ships with a very nice premade animated water shader with it's package,  You could start from there, though i would (if you plan to release) check with ati (write them an email you can find address i nthe about dialog of rendermonkey) and ask for permission   ;  There are TONS of resources online for rendering water, it really is a huge subject of research for developers.  For something really simple, I might suggest layered scrolling textures.  Either using a sin/cos wave or just straight scrolling, with each layer scrolling a little different from each other.  This gives a moving feeling to the surface, but the multiple laters still helps give a more random look to it.   