I bought this popular water shader which seemed to work flawlessly for UE4: Cartoon Water Shader | Fab
But opening the demo project in UE5, the water now looks black:
I tried asking the asset creator but it seems this is now abandonware.
I heard that missing a reflection capture could cause this, but the scene already has one…
Any help would be greatly appreciated before I have to request a refund and go back to the drawing board.
Thanks
Does the water shader compile without errors? Does it contain custom material nodes?
If it relies on custom depth for any reason then maybe it needs to be enabled inside of the project settings? Try setting to enable with stencil
Also make sure you enable generate mesh distance fields
The supported engine version is marked up to 5.5. Maybe downloading the newer version fixes this?
Could be if you are using Substrate in UE5 and the old materials haven’t been changed, they can appear black in those cases.
When I load the scene, I do get a warning about 1 landscape actor being out of date. Not sure if it means the water, but clicking rebuild doesn’t fix it anyways.
I have custom depth set to Enabled with Stencil, and generate mesh distance fields is enabled.
And sorry for the misunderstanding, I’m currently on UE5.5. I think the supported engine being up to 5.5 is a hoax, seeing as the owner hasn’t responded to any replies since 2023…
@qubitVicks Substrate is disabled. I enabled it just to see what difference that could make but no difference.
Although I did find something interesting. It seems the blackness is coming from the depth shader, which appears to be using Substrate(?)
My previous comment is incorrect - I just learned that the materials are automatically converted to Substrate. Re-disabling it reverted it to its original state. Oops!
But the fact still stands that the depth material is rendering black. I don’t know if this is a red herring or actually the source of the problem…
Well none of the materials output nodes are connected, so the material doesn’t return a value.
Thanks guys for your time, it helped me eventually figure this out!