How do I fix water being too transparent / no color? (screenshots)

So I just started learning how to use the unreal engine Water plugin and ran into a small problem, everything is working fine except that my river seems almost invisible, with only a slight blur. I watched some tutorials and the rivers were nice and blue by default but mine wasn’t


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Could be a lack of reflection captures or a bad engine material.

The videos you probably saw are usually done with custom materials

Make a copy of the material, modify it, create an instance and plug it in.

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hi, im having same issue with water, and very nooby to all of this thing. Can you please explane/link the video about the thing u told us to do, please? Me personaly is using default water materials, and every guy in the tutorials i saw - changed nothing. Thank you!

First, make sure you have a good skybox/skysphere, and that you have at least a few sphere reflection captures in the scene.

Second, make sure that the material is high up enough to cover the entire trough – it looks like yours is just barely skimming the ground.

Third, if it still doesn’t work right, then you can make a copy of the material, and modify that copy, to do approximately:

  • increase opacity
  • increase amount of reflection (reduce roughness very close to 0)
  • increase amount of specular
  • reduce albedo (main color)
  • possibly tint the albedo (color) with something green/gray/brown/blue, depending on the look you want

This should make the water more visible.

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Im having exact same issue as the topicstarter, and i tried all of the things thas you said, and nothing of it helped :frowning: So i made some kind of experiment: created a new project with a default level (lightning, sky+atmosphere etc.) and made a landscape in it with UE water. Here is the result:

But when i delete water+landscape, and import heightmap to generate new landscape and add a new water - it is doesnt work, and dont even react on any changes in the material of water and looks like on screenshot of topicstarter

One of the requirements is that the components of the landscape are an exact square. So make sure that’s the case.

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Mate, dunno if u r fixed your problem, but i had same thing with water. To fix it you need to create a default landscape in addition to your height-map-generated one. After that you will see, that your height-map-generated landscape is way below than newly created one. So you need to get height-map-generated landscape on the same height, as plain landscape is, and then delete it. After that you can add river to your landscape )

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