Poker room · underwater feel

Water, layer by layer

Our poker room with water effects running live on top of it, in the browser, in real time, no video. Nothing in the scene moves and nobody swims anywhere: this is all atmosphere. The only question is which layers make the room feel like it is underwater. Switch them on and off.

Click the water

Presets

01 Motion

02 Light

03 Color and glass

Wave shape One wave loops visibly after about twenty seconds. Two do not.

Sway amount 1.00x Push it until it feels like water, then back off until the cards are still comfortable to read.

One layer at a time

The same room, one effect each, so it is obvious what every layer does on its own. Several of them look like nothing alone and change the whole picture once stacked. Each panel is turned up a little compared to the scene above, so the effect is visible at this size.

Camera sway

The whole room breathes. Nothing in the scene actually moves, only the frame does, and that alone reads as sitting inside a fluid. This panel keeps switching between the two versions: one wave, which the eye eventually catches looping, and two mismatched waves plus a breathing zoom, which never resolve into a pattern.

Bubbles

Sparse and slow reads as water. Dense and fast reads as a jacuzzi. The sideways drift is what sells it: perfectly straight vertical lines look like rain.

Suspended particles

Water you look through, not just water you look at. Three sheets of dots scrolling at different speeds, so the space between the camera and the table has thickness.

Light from above

Columns of light coming down through the water put a surface somewhere above the cabin, even though you never see it. Each shaft breathes on its own rhythm so they never pulse together.

Caustics on the table

The moving web of light that water throws onto a surface. On the felt it is the most convincing single signal that there is water above this room, and it pairs with the light shafts: same source, same direction.

Caustics on the lens

The same pattern laid over the whole frame instead of over the table. It reads as glass rather than water, so it stays very faint. See the comparison further down.

Depth tint and vignette

A cool cast over everything plus darkened corners. This is the one real trade in the set: the lanterns go bluer and lose some of their warmth, and in exchange the room goes deeper.

Warp on one object

Water distorting one part of the frame instead of all of it. Here it is the captain. Across the whole screen this reads as nausea; on a single object it reads as a layer of moving water in front of it.

Ripples on tap

The only effect here that answers the player. Everything else becomes wallpaper after a minute; this one keeps working because it is a reply to something they did. Tap the panel.

Three things worth arguing about

Each pair runs the same room with one decision changed. These are the three calls I would want settled before anyone builds this properly.

Sway: one wave or two

On a single wave, the eye finds the loop in about twenty seconds and the room stops reading as water and starts reading as a broken animation. Two waves with mismatched periods (3.7s and 5.3s) plus a slight breathing of the zoom never line up, so it never resolves into a pattern. Watch the left one for a while, then the right one.

One wave the loop becomes visible

Two waves + zoom never repeats

Caustics: on the lens or on the table

The usual approach is to lay the light pattern over the whole frame. But light comes from above and lands on surfaces, so a full frame overlay slides around with the camera and reads as dirt on the glass. Put the same pattern on the felt and it stays where it belongs. Both panels sway harder than normal so the difference is obvious.

Over the frame smeared on the glass

On the table anchored to the room

How much is too much

Same layers, same room, two strengths. On the left everything runs at full force and the art starts to disappear under it: the felt glows, the cards get hazy, the lanterns lose their color. On the right the identical set runs at half. The stronger the painting, the less you are allowed to put on top of it, and this room is a strong painting.

Full strength the art disappears

Half strength the art still leads

What would need the art in layers

Three more effects exist that cannot run on a single flat painting, because they need the room delivered as separated planes: far wall, middle, foreground. Here they are on a scene drawn that way, so you can decide whether they are worth asking the artist for.

Parallax: as the camera sways, near things shift more than far things. This is the strongest depth signal that exists in a 2D scene, and it needs at least three separate planes.

A visible water surface: a waterline with air above it turns blue from a color filter into an actual place. It does not apply to a closed cabin, but it would apply to any outdoor scene.

Things that sway on their own: plants, ropes, cloth, tentacles. Anything soft bending with the current, with the tips lagging behind the base.

How to read this demo

This runs in a browser on plain canvas. In Unity the same layer list looks better, not worse.
Order matters more than any single layer. Color, then motion, then light. Switch them on in a different order and the early ones look like they do nothing.
Nothing here is a filter baked over the finished frame. Every layer is a separate element, which is why any of them can be turned off, moved behind a character, or tuned on its own.
The caustics on the table are aimed at an ellipse I measured by eye off this image. On a real screen they would follow the table itself.