Best ingame ocean on Unreal Engine 4?

[bzinventor]

Couldn't believe my eyes when I saw the game Sea of Thieves' ocean. Was stunned to fund out it was done using Unreal Engine 4!

How was it accomplished. Tutorial please, lol.

[fighter5347]

Either they have used a good combination between tessellation, particle effects and other material effects (just take a look at the ocean tutorials that you can find on youtube + check out the water package which you can find in the learn tab of the launcher), or they have used nvidia wave works/gameworks https://forums.unrealengine.com/show...ks-Integration

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iilqtDkeIBE

[janpec]

I freaking love the lighting of Unreal engine. One thing i dont understand in this thread is why did you put question mark on end of your question? It obviously is the most stunning ocean ever in any game,

[bzinventor]

I freaking love the lighting of Unreal engine. One thing i dont understand in this thread is why did you put question mark on end of your question? It obviously is the most stunning ocean ever in any game,

Second that.

[DotCam]

Agree with Fighter here, either that is WaveWorks or they implemented their own FFT based shader (which is what WaveWorks uses).

FFT is very complicated but the end result is worth it. I have done a lot of research for my OceanPlugin on the different kinds of formulas/systems and FFT + Gerstner based system seems to be the go to solution right now for modern games. The VaOcean plugin created by ufna is FFT based, but has some serious performance issues (and is no longer being worked on).

If anyone who is really good with math and C++ want's to try implementing it, I have a lot of reference material available if requested. But be warned, it is VERY complex, and C++/HLSL knowledge is a must, this cannot be done using blueprint/material graphs.

It is something I want to try to implement soon, but I can't guarantee when (or if it will even work ).

[haldolium]

The "only" difference here apparently, compared to many state-of-the-art wave shaders, is that is uses a lot of foam effects both in the shader as well as in combination with particle effects when waves are "colliding". Otherwise it is "just another ocean shader" that still is inable to represent actual wave behaviour of concave waves breaking.

So in any case, start with what great people have done in the UE4 so far. There are a few approaches and tutorials as well as source codes available for pretty neat ocean shaders, such as the one provided by DotCam.



One thing that would be probably really nice to know is how to combine those shaders with particle effects and re-creating the spray of foam such as in the video.

[raydEx]

I can't imagine how they combination foam with particle effects , usually the foam was generated in GPU, so the particle effects couldn't know the position.

[ufna]

The VaOcean plugin created by ufna is FFT based, but has some serious performance issues (and is no longer being worked on).

Yep, I'm thinking to refactor the whole system and reborn the plugin ) (I've implemented it really wrong in first try)

[srmojuze]

I freaking love the lighting of Unreal engine. One thing i dont understand in this thread is why did you put question mark on end of your question? It obviously is the most stunning ocean ever in any game,

Lightmass. Plus UE4 Post Process and UE4 Shaders. I still can't believe how aesthetically beautiful UE4 is.