I made a waterfall a little while back for a project and just used a couple planes with moving textures on them. I then augmented it with some particle effects. It didn’t look awesome but then again I didn’t spend much time on it. Have you taken a look at the particle effects cave demo? There are several waterfalls and water effects in there.
Here’s my quick attempt, You could take this way further: ?t=9m33s
I assumed it would be mesh, but how to make it flow so perfectly with the terrain like in the two pictures I’ve posted. But I will check out the particle effects demo. Thanks.
The outpost23 new unreal tournament’s map has a nice waterfall in the background. Not sure how it’s made tho.
Right at the start of this video you can see it : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-lylzRC1uFg
And I’m running this map at 240 fps, so it’s optimized hehe!
-First I added the rocks and populated the map;
-Exported everything to 3ds max;
-Made a power by 2 square plane covering the area where the waterfall will be;
-Baked the area as a heightmap in 3ds max;
-Imported in Mudbox to smoothen out the baked heightmap, export;
-Put the heightmap in World Machine, added just an erosion filter and put the erosion on the lowest setting, output the flow map;
-Use displacement modifier on the plane with the heightmap you exported in mudbox;
-Used the ProOptimizer modifier to make the mesh simple and removed faces that were useless, did not add tot he shape and faces that would not be seen;
-Exported the simplified mesh, which will be the waterfall mesh;
-Made a simple material and applied the flow map outputted in World Machine as opacity mask.
I used vertex painting with HeightLerp for this one, and gpu particles for the water spray.
But maybe not that performance friendly but easy to change the areas where I want the water to be.