I think the rule for water blocks is, if it’s the top surface of a water block, it renders with the transparent shader. If it’s the side, the assumption is that the water is flowing, which gets rendered with the flowing water texture.
Unfortunately water up against the side of a glass, which shouldn’t be flowing, it shown with a flowing texture.
I am not sure it can be rendered with the top surface shader due to performance concerns, but I do think that maybe a transparent nonreflective shader would better represent the physical reality of what’s going on.
The specific concern is that underwater tunnels look great if you look up, you can see through the water and it’s awesome. But from the side it’s just blue.
I’ve been asking this for ages, totally agree with you regarding the transparency of glass placed next to water. I’ve always kept tropical aquariums and the glass is perfectly clear when looking through it. The only time I’ve almost seen the water flowing down the sides is when I’m doing a partial water change and nearly forgot and left the water running and it’s almost overflowed.
Apparently it’s something to do with the distance fog rendering that you see when underwater if I remember correctly, can’t find the reply I had from one of the Devs regarding this unfortunately. Personally I think it would look better without the water flowing down the glass and be perfectly clear like glass above water than the current situation which is completely wrong.
I am not sure it is the distance fog rendering because it’s the moving texture, not a fog thing. If it were fog then you could see for a short distance.
It being transparent would also cause issues with fogging. Underwater will have seperate fog parameters to outside water soon, and when the camera is in water it will change to ‘water fog’, but if you could see straight into the water from outside without the ‘waterfall’ effect it’d often look totally broken fog-wise
Personally I could easily live with there being no underwater fog when viewed through glass as the current situation looks even more broke to me.
