Oh that sounds perfect, and you just expose the end result of the AI decisions to the Fish’s blueprint? That sounds great, try and expose as many parts as possible to blueprint so the user can adjust them, which it sounds like you already have been doing. is really great, what you mentioned here:
is exactly how I wan’t project to be. There can be as much confusing code as we want behind the scenes but make all of that invisible to a level designer, or someone who works i blueprints only. That is my ultimate goal here with everything, I want anyone to be able to open it up and have fun with it.
So once again, looks great, there is no rush on the code assets at all, take you time! Once they are ready it would probably be easiest if you compress it into a Zip or Rar file (or 7z) so you can upload it to dropbox, google Drive, Mega, or others and send me a PM with the link.
You could also just post the link here in the if you would rather, but a PM would be better imo.
Thanks man!
Also worth noting, the water samples have been released by Epic are now on the Learn Tab of the launcher, I will be going over them all tomorrow, hopefully I will find a few good nuggets of wisdom to incorporate into project.
! I saw the water sample on the learn tab morning very indeed. I’m really excited to see what you implement into your water system atm you are our Poseidon hehe . Good luck!!
That is looking great guys! I now have a few questions for you…
First is the water surface viewed from below, I’m guessing you added in another one sided material plane to get that effect while underwater? Or are you changing the base material values while underwater? I’m trying to decide which way to go on that, leaning towards modifying the material since there are already 2 plane meshes.
Second, those light shafts look great! Was accomplished using a mesh plane “godray”? also are they placed manually or are they particles?
And of course the caustics, did you guys use a light function? Or is it added to the sea-floor material itself?
You guys are doing a really job!! Thank you for posting up these videos here as well, it’s great to see your progress on .
That is really strange, I thought I had fixed that prior to uploading. They are 2 redundant variables which I removed from the blueprint, and then deleted the struct type they were created with. Somehow they were still referenced by the BP even though I had deleted them first, causing error message.
Long story short, just press OK. They do not actually exist, so there is no harm in removing them. has already been fixed in the version.
I can answer the first question, but I’ll have to wait a day or two to get back to you on the second one. My friend spent an all-nighter making the caustics, and we’ve been spending many hours a day since then awake (we had a tech demo today for our sponsor, it went well!). Anyway I need to ask him to get insight into how he worked the light shafts.
As for the material, yes we use a material plane, when the player is underwater we simply set your water to invisible. When you reach a certain part of the Z axes you actually become a different blueprint actor and that actor’s possession sets your to visible, and sets our plane to invisible. Ideally I think you would want to modify the material, we just haven’t had enough time to learn ue4 materials yet with our project ending in 2 weeks.
I’ll be sure to ask my friend about the light shafts. In fact I might convince him to create his own account and post !
Apparently the sun not moving was fixed in the latest preview build but it’s not fixed with the sun / weather system in the current build of the project
I am currently working on a school project where we are using the material for our world. Unfortunately we have had a bit of a performance and have disabled the waves temporarily, but the water still looks pretty good.
We are thinking about trying to limit the tessellation and displacements to just being around the players, as apposed to calculating the entire world, but currently we don’t know how well that will work with the multiplayer aspect of the game.
@: Thanks for the info! I think I will give a 3rd plane a try
Hmmm… I’l look into it again I probably missed something. Just for clarification you are using the most recent download of the skydome correct?
Yeah that is a big problem with the material, it uses up a lot of resources… I am attempting to make it as realistic as possible, which only adds to the complexity. makes it difficult to use in a game that targets lower end hardware.
One thing I have done for the upcoming version is reduce the Gerstner wave count to 8 instead of 16, which makes a big difference. I am doing mainly because the extra ones aren’t necessary when paired with a secondary noise function. The Gerstner waves control the large rolling surface while the smaller waves break it up to add more definition. along with an LOD system has managed to reduce the performance impact while keeping (or even augmenting) the look of the . I hope to have out any day now…
For multiplayer the OceanManager code in C++ is an exact duplicate of the calculations used in the material, that could be useful for calculating the surface without actually rendering it. I have not tested out, but I am pretty sure it should work.
Well that is really strange… I just unzipped a fresh copy of the project from the upload for 4.6.1, then converted it to 4.7 p8, and the sun/moon work perfectly.
I think I may know why you are having issues though, isn’t well documented (sorry)… If you migrate the Skydome out you will need to set the DirectionalLight manually using drop-down box:
If you Zip up just the blueprint asset file and post a link here I can look into it for you? I don’t know what might have happened but I have had issues with the default values of variables (or value/slider ranges) resetting to 0 when migrating between projects. That would be the first place I would look, it’s happened twice out 3 bp’s I migrated in the past few days. Feel free to upload it and leave a link, I’l see what I can do.
Also a quick note just in case, the Time Scale value is set to 1 by default, which is 1min game-time = 1min real-time, try setting it to like 1000 to make sure.
If that is still not it can you clarify the for me? I saw in another thread it mentioned the sun moved for half a day and then quit. Is that your, or does the sun/moon not rotate at all? If it doesn’t rotate at all, where is the sun related to time of day? is it right at noon straight up, or closer to the horizon (like 4pm/9am)? Thanks man.
I would have posted video along with my last post, but you know how it goes. Someone broke something during an update and I had to wait for them to push out a quick fix.
Hey there, I was the one who set up the underwater , and to answer your questions:
There’s a new plane that is enabled when underwater. It’s just has a translucent material on it with panning normal maps.
The light shafts are actually just the default occlusion-based light shafts that come with the directional light. The only difference is the occlusion mask darkness is set to -1 to intensify the effect.
The caustics were created using a light function on the directional light. Its much like the panning texture on the water, but I blended 3 different textures. There’s also a second direction light that’s set up for static lightmaping, though Unreal doesnt support lightmapping on foliage.
O ya, there’s also an exponential height fog in the scene too that really helps with scattering the light entering the water and limiting view distance.
hehe . Good luck!!
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