[Community Project] WIP Weather & Ocean Water Shader

[Jacky]

You may want to try Google Drive as well. I dont know if it has any limitation on bandwidth traffic though.

And thanks again for sharing! The customization of the ocean material is awesome.

[DotCam]

You may want to try Google Drive as well. I dont know if it has any limitation on bandwidth traffic though.

Good call, I forgot I already have one set up!
[MENTION=1057]JamesB[/MENTION]arnette I will add in the download link for the Google Drive download once it has uploaded. -DONE linked above

And thanks again for sharing! The customization of the ocean material is awesome.

It took a long time to create all of the variables/structs/parameters but I think it was worth it, having to change values in the material instance (or worse, in the material and need to recompile shaders) made it worth the effort. Have fun with it!

[James Barnette]

Thanks a million mate!

[HeadClot]

Just curious would it be possible to make a river tool or somthing with this using the built in spline tools?

Just curious here.

[Kuro1n]

Thanks a bunch for this man, great job and **** neat!

[DotCam]

Just curious would it be possible to make a river tool or somthing with this using the built in spline tools?

Just curious here.

It could, the wave animation might need to be shrunk down to large ripples instead of waves, but you can make those waves travel as fast as you want in any direction. That's a good idea actually, I'll play around with it on the weekend and let you know if I get it working. Sounds like a fun challenge!

Thanks a bunch for this man, great job and **** neat!

Glad you like it! Let me know of any other features to add to it (underwater/swimming will be added in next update).

And yes, I do have some form of Unreal OCD (UnOCD?) where I can't stand a mess of wires, hope it helps to make it easier to understand!

[Wozner]

Holy Moly!

DotCam you did a blowing mind work! I will try to test your shader when I get a chance. You asked for ideas, maybe you can make a storm rain weather? Increase density for the rain particles

[DotCam]

Holy Moly!

DotCam you did a blowing mind work! I will try to test your shader when I get a chance. You asked for ideas, maybe you can make a storm rain weather? Increase density for the rain particles

Glad you like it!

The weather system is only partly completed at the moment, that is why there are no '3d' clouds or rain yet. I have a few ideas that I am testing out in my master project, but I didn't want to include it in the download yet as it only sort of works (that's my way of saying it is mostly broken ).

Beyond that, the cloud textures are not great, and are tiling too much. All of the textures included in the download come from the sample projects Epic created on the marketplace, some of them look great, others like the clouds & ocean shore foam are not so great. I will try and come up with some better looking textures for a future release.

Thanks for the suggestions! They are on my list.

[James Barnette]

Bug!!!

Wave Set Time Multiplier locks to 0.0 if you try to change it.

even trying to manually type it in results in a value of 0.0. thus freezing the waves.

Great work thus far.


Features request: A preset drop down for presets values that relate the Beaufort scale. This is a how the ocean waves are categorized.

[James Barnette]

Ok,....2 more issues rendering related. In the image below the biggest one is that is seems that the mask for the foam is being calculated as a depth calculation similar to the way depth-fade is calculated. This has a very obvious flaw in its approach. as you can see the foam clips when it extends beyond the object. This approach will work fine for a shoreline but fails for anything that doesn't extend beyond the foam itself.

The mask for objects breaking the surface of the ocean should be and AO based approach.


The second issue and I'm not sure what this one is but I know it has something to do with Depth fade.. it appears that The depth fade calculation is somehow clipping you specular in the material causing it to mask out objects that are under the surface. this seems to only apply to mesh objects and not BSP or landscapes.

[DotCam]

Bug!!!

Wave Set Time Multiplier locks to 0.0 if you try to change it.

even trying to manually type it in results in a value of 0.0. thus freezing the waves.

Great work thus far.

This is a really weird and unnecessary bug... I went back and checked my master project to see what was different, and it turns out the ONLY thing was in the BP_OceanSystem variables, WaveSetTimeMultipler had a "Slider value" range of 0 - 0 when it should have been 0 - 10. I changed it back, and it works again. Looks like something went wrong when I migrated the content over to the demo project. Here is the setting so you can fix it on your end without having to download everything again, change the two values I have marked in the image below to 10 and then compile & save the blueprint, it should now work correctly.

Features request: A preset drop down for presets values that relate the Beaufort scale. This is a how the ocean waves are categorized.

Thanks for the suggestion! I was planning to include presets for the weather as well, so I will add this to my list!

[DotCam]

Ok,....2 more issues rendering related. In the image below the biggest one is that is seems that the mask for the foam is being calculated as a depth calculation similar to the way depth-fade is calculated. This has a very obvious flaw in its approach. as you can see the foam clips when it extends beyond the object. This approach will work fine for a shoreline but fails for anything that doesn't extend beyond the foam itself.

The mask for objects breaking the surface of the ocean should be and AO based approach.


The second issue and I'm not sure what this one is but I know it has something to do with Depth fade.. it appears that The depth fade calculation is somehow clipping you specular in the material causing it to mask out objects that are under the surface. this seems to only apply to mesh objects and not BSP or landscapes.

Yeah the foam is no where near ideal, I left it in as I have not come up with a better system yet unfortunately. Do you have any more info on the AO technique? Moving it out of base color would help as I don't like calling DepthFade so many times along the line, it is bound to cause issues (maybe even the one you show in the image). Before I added in the foam the opacity depth worked much better, now it seems to only affect the color instead of actually fading by distance.

Thanks for reporting these issues!

EDIT: Looking into this a bit more it looks like the DepthFade is inverted somehow, the translucency should pull away from in front of the camera when the value is decreased, instead it is making the areas furthest from the camera translucent first, the lower the value, the closer it comes to the camera. I'm not going to upload a new version of this until I get this sorted out, the TimeMultipler fix is fairly simple, but this is not good at all...

EDIT #2: So after some more investigating the normal output from the wave calculations is causing major problems in the DepthFade for Opacity & Base Color. I have simply removed the connection from the 2 DepthFade node's and can see a big improvement to the overall look.

I will be updating the links shortly with this fix in place, it is not the answer to this issue but makes a big difference.

[Tesla]

I have to say DotCam, this is really incredible work! Keep it up. I love how easy it is to customize it to your liking. Seriously great!

[DotCam]

I have to say DotCam, this is really incredible work! Keep it up. I love how easy it is to customize it to your liking. Seriously great!

Hey thanks Tesla! I saw all of the requests for some kind of water system and decided to do something about it, it has been a great learning experience for me so far, but is still far from complete. Glad you like it though!

I'm just uploading the new files, there was a couple of bugs and rendering issues with the depth fade and opacity, they have been temporarily fixed, but will still be working on a permanent fix as well.

Your tutorials have been a huge help, I spent the first six months just leaning UE4 through tutorials like yours, so thank you for providing them!

Let me know if you have any ideas to improve the system!

[James Barnette]

Yeah the foam is no where near ideal, I left it in as I have not come up with a better system yet unfortunately. Do you have any more info on the AO technique?

I know that there is a AO being done. But I don't know how you can access it . it is available as a buffer. It would need to be inverted and have its contrast adjusted but in theory should provide a perfect masking solution for object penetrating the water. the other solution would be to do the math and calculate it yourself to give you more control.

I did find this. But honestly it is way over my head. http://www.gamedev.net/page/resource...-to-ssao-r2753


Not sure if that would work though you are prolly going to need a solution that avoids self occlusion and only calculates for other objects.

Also note that this is not practical for the shore line and that the depth based approach is prolly more effective there.