[Community Project] FREE Ocean Water Shader

[NilsonLima]

I'm not that great myself :\ was hoping there was an easy way, or one already working

Give me week or two and I will sort this out. I need to review the whole AI thing again so at least I can do it properly with best practices in mind. Likely to post a video.

[SpartanDevTeam]

sweet can't wait

[NilsonLima]

I have just committed an update for anyone wanting to test with UE4.22 preview 4 available at Epic Launcher. There were some adjustments necessary for the planar reflections (which touching it too much may lead to a crash). Don't forget to submit any crash report to Epic to help the devs to fix bugs when they appear!

https://github.com/UE4-OceanProject/...jectNilsonLima

[SpartanDevTeam]

Any luck with the ai boats?

[Gallonmate]

There's an AI boat in this awesome guys boat physics project. You can use, adapt it, or learn from it.
https://twitter.com/HoussineMehnik/s...02196873334784

[SpartanDevTeam]

That's very different to community project, community project uses thrusters.

[NilsonLima]

Any luck with the ai boats?

Going to give a look into this during the week.

[Dreamcastgamer]

Finally at the stage to start implementing water.

Have tried several shaders but sadly have not found one that seems to fit.

Ultra is too reflective and recourse intensive and the other shaders seem to have this "black" spot issue or i have no way of controlling the water. Im also wondering if a way has been found on shrinking the ocean to a certain size yet?

[Gallonmate]

Yes you can turn off infinite ocean and set the mesh size of the ocean. If you keyword search the old, now locked thread you can find some answers to most questions you might have.

[NilsonLima]

Dreamcastgamer The Infinite Ocean System just scales the top mesh (the below ones aswel) which is a circular plane with more vertices in the middle and less vertices around borders. There is one approach to make a smaller plane without touching a single line of C++ code:

1) create a substitute circular plane mesh with equally distribution of vertices (otherwise when near the border of the plane several artifacts are seen at the waves)
2) in the Infinite System portion of the details panel there are two settings: Scale Min and Scale Max (default values are respec. 1 and 45 times) which you can use very small values like 0.2 on both
3) the setting Follow Method should be changed to Stationary

Remember that, if you are inside a boat and travelling you need to have the Follow Method changed back to Pawn or Camera and probably have the Scale values changed to something different.

Another approach possible requires changing the C++ code for you to specify that you don't want the scaling at all, but this would still need the Follow Method to work (otherwise you will need it ahead) and the circular plane will still have to be made to offer a better look near the borders.

[NilsonLima]

Dreamcastgamer besides above, the performance is only an issue on open sea, where the ocean becomes a large area and the planar reflections becomes a heavy cost. At land you can try to occlude whenever you can parts of the ocean providing a cove and some hills around the cove, unless you really need a free beach for some reason. If there is a harbor, some building will help occlude portions of the ocean ahead, and improve performance (less things to show).

Having a smaller plane hardly will improve much the performance, but certainly will have some percentage in gains.

[Dreamcastgamer]

Thanks everyone for all the help, will play around with it in the future and share the results here

[MaximeDupart]

Jumping into the thread. Tested the plugin a couple months back and checking it out again. How hard would it be to apply the ocean to a sphere? Any suggestions?

Keep up doing God's work,

Best,
Max

[Dreamcastgamer]

Was able to figure out how to limit the size and shape, thanks a bunch!

On a side note, i was curious about the foam.

In order to try and improve performance, i have been trying the shader "Ocean w/ SSR & Foam" as it looks fantastic but not as intensive as Ultra.

However i have been unable to get any foams to appear period to it, im wondering if there is something special you have to do in the foam settings or is it only available in Ultra?

[NilsonLima]

Dreamcastgamer I think something is indeed wrong with foam there. There is no change that makes the foam caps to return. It will be necessary to compare M_Ocean_SSR and M_Ocean_Ultra and seek what the difference is. It is sort of a hack, but you can select in BP_Ocean the Ultra, edit the M_Ocean_Ultra and enable SSR and Forward shading, also break the connections inside the BP_Ocean which turns on the Planar Reflection component and see if it will gives the performance you want.

I am without a bit of time right now to do the experiments.