Lima, have you approached yet? Any news? Really appreciate the effort.
He is with health issues atm, we are still waiting to discuss with him. Im parallel, I will see if it is feasible to have a blueprint version on the free Seasons which I was developing and about to integrate with project after it is done, so one or the other it might happen if I succeed in making a FFT version without compute shaders.
Thanks for the updateā¦ best wishes for , hope he recovers quickly.
Okay ā¦ I was about to close thread but at looks as if differences have been sorted and we are all on the same page again. Yay for all of you for not letting the thread de-rail too extensively.
Sorry guys, I was caught up in a whirlwind of triggery and deep seated professional issues. I wonāt let it happen again.
Hi ALL! I am looking for ways to setup MASKING for my floating creations. I typed masking into the search box for forum thread and only got 2 pages of results. Then I used CTRL+F to pull up the find in Chrome, and put āmaskingā in there. And I still havent found out how to use masking. Can anyone just point me int he right direction. Im a pretty good self starter if I can read the instructions. I did see the level that demonstrates masking but I wasnt able to figure out how to apply it to my mesh.
There are different approaches one could tackle to do it. Distance Fields would do the trick but you have two issues: everything including landscape will affect the material and depends a lot on your scene if thats ok or not, second is that at distance you start to lost precision and the mask size reduces in size, meaning that the far the camera is you will need to add some extra offset to compensate.
The pictures below show how to do it for opaque or translucent /water material:
Join the discord server for project at: Discord when I get time I will do a quick tutorial on different masking options, but I guess you will do just fine with the tip above. Of course the node connection above would multiply anything else placed in there just in case.
Lima,
Just one more last note,
When you speak to , please pass on why is so important for some of us. I canāt speak for others, but for me, time and the ability to easily customize the shader for my projects, and the lack of a full shader on the Marketplace, is the number one reason I would like to see in BPs on the Markietplace.
Plugins are the more optimized why to go, but with new engine versions coming out almost every month, and all that code to go thru, I would rather start with a BP implementation.
I donāt have a problem with codingā¦ I am a Level 5 Preeminent Advisor for Australia, and I teach at places like Caltec and NASA. I do think water shaders in general are an area better left to real experts.
For me, time is my biggest constraint, and I really support and appreciate that EPIC lets us use the engine, and the Marketplace is getting better all the time, a great place for learning. But, it has always lacked one thingā¦ what we are discussing.
I think is a genius for coming up with the BP system, which helped me in many ways. I started messing around with UE3 ten years ago. Then I had to put it on holdā¦ I was diagnoses with stage 4 Ampullary/Pancreatic Cancer and given two months to live. is not the place to go into it, but I can understand if is dealing with health issuesā¦. It puts life in perspective. And messing around with UE4 helped me pass the time, years of timeā¦ but it is hard to concentrate when you are pumped full of Chemoā¦ thus my love for EPICās BPs.
Just had my ten year checkup, Dr. called it a miracle, said I am cured. So, I am working as fast as possible on a new project, based on the Amalfi coastline, and one of the major elements is ā¦ you guessed it, water.
A full featured shader on the Marketplace would be great, BP implementation even better, but I need more than just a beautiful surface, I need a beautiful underwater environment as well.
There is always hopeā¦.
Noted. He will know.
I do know the importance of blueprints. My current asset selling at MP is based in blueprint, thou it was first produced in C++. For me it was an experiment and while I watch the versions coming and go, I do check that version if it is hard to maintain and how it is affected, since the rendering module at engine and related APIs are the ones that most change. I would not disguise, it creeps me out the amount of errors that I see, but meanwhile it is getting better and C++ version will be released in the future, with even more features and performance.
Back to topic, it is not hard to have a good shader in BP, but the is really when you start to add features, the performance suffers too much, and while the material editor is good enough for most of the cases, you are quite limited on what to do to improve performance, even trying to insert some HLSL here and there. Compute shaders are a way to use some extra horse power inside the GPU to parallel some stuff, and is currently one approach we are going after when developing the FFT and Gerstner version with compute shaders, to be able to add features. The version 4.19 and 4.20 brought to the table some features that we will work, we will develop more materials for each scenario of use and we are sure that the end result will compensate.
As I told you, even if does not accept the change, I still have my that I will try to have a version in blueprint, therefore you will have one of them for sure, hopefully both. Im just one guy with 24 project ideas, working on 5 simultaneously and not enough time even working 15 hours a day. We will get there, eventually 
Thank you Lima,
That is fantastic newsā¦
Donāt get burned out ā¦ one of my favorite move quotes is āThe light that twice as bright half as long.ā
Sounds like you could use a vacationā¦
Thank you for the help sir! I havent yet had time to really focus on it but I will try your blueprints and see if i can put together. I did sign up for Discord. Hopefully Ill see you all there!
Beautiful. I wish I had TrueSky.
script526, wonderful
I updated my engine to 4.20 quite a while ago, but recieves error:
āThe following modules are missing or built with a different engine version: OceanPlugin. Would you like to rebuild them now?ā
How do I move around ?
Rebuild would be the next step when engine release changes, but sometimes engineās APIs change and it might require changes in the source code for a rebuild to succeed. We still didnāt update the repository at with the 4.20 because we are in the process of heavy changes in the plugin.
You can just rebuild or open the .sln file and build from Visual Studio and then open the project again in the UE Editor.
Can I align gorgeous Plugin to Sphree surface somehow without code modification or if I must change something then where ?
Good question though. For space-travelling games.
Currently the Infinite System only works with a plane, so short answer is no. If you want to simulate a planet surface seen from above you will need to use a different material to show the oceans when approaching from space and only shift to the current plugin when it is near enough for the details you want to show.
Thanks so much. I have been scouring forum for 2 hours to get underwater working. I though their must be a problem with the z-index of all my actors being out of sync but noā¦a simple project setting. Thanks so much!!!