So I see the water material is really challenging, and a lot of people are trying hard to produce a realistic water result.
I am still learning how to use UE4, and this was my first large material and post to the UE4 community, so please be easy on me, hehe.
I too was trying to figure out how I could texture and animate the water. For animation I read somewhere that you could do it with morph targets, and materials editor in UE4, but the math algorithm stuff like the ocean simulator shader that people are posting looks even more amazing then this. I couldn’t figure out how make the formulas work using FFT and what Nvdia guys did with the real-time ocean simulator. Anyways, I couldn’t understand how to get the morph targets to work in a loop while in gameplay for small non skeletal mesh assets, and in this case, I used the traditional materials editor path to achieve this water result as seen in the video. Ideally I wanted to animate with keyframes from 3ds Max, but I couldn’t find anywhere if it was at all possible. I hope this could be a feature one day soon. It will help exporting animations of regular meshes without bones.
The water was animated using the world position offset node in the materials editor. I was just experimenting how the water would look adjusting various variables, having some basic textures applied to the mesh using UE4, and i love how easy it was to setup.
You can also download this material if you want from here.
Feel free to update or modify the material as you wish, maybe post a free tutorial here and there of making something similar. These I think help us all the most.
Thanks,
Oleg
www.GameDev.tk
Additional UE4 Wishlist
- Export Blueprint to JPG button with good image quality for easier sharing - sort of like a render all button used in 3ds max, in the top toolbar of UE4. This would be so nice.
- Pack Blueprint nodes - similar to pack uv’s, compresses and aligns nodes on a tighter grid while maintaining the wire links. - Helps reduce the Zoom -13 view.