Go into the Water Material, make sure “ocean foam” is enabled, and set foam height bias to something between 0.6 to 1 (default is -1)
If you want to get experimental, put a BP_FluidSim_01 into the level, over the area you want (Check Show Water Mesh) to see its placement,
- Use "Simulation World Size to control its Size, and “Wave World Size” to control the area of which is simulated.
- Uncheck “Follow Actor” to make sure it stays in place while you test
- Remember you only see results while you run “Play Simulate” for some stuff.
- Uncheck “Use Custom distance field” in the water material. It’s only used when you use scene capture (I think), and you won’t get any waves.
- Uncheck “Generate Distance field” in BP Fluid sim for same reasons. And uncheck “Use Scene Capture” in the Shallow water component"
Check “Simulate Wave foam” to get wave foam, though, you might want to turn down height bias so it’s visible. It’s finicky though because you need to play with “Resolution” (Size of droplets afaik), “Wave foam resolution” (quality of foam), “Damping” - how much water is restricting to going back to normal state, ie how stable it is. There’s also some settings only on the components to fluid sim, the shallow water and wave foam components.
For instance, you can set some “advect materials” on the shallow water component that controls how much water is “added” on forces etc.
There are also differences between Shallow Water and Ripple solver, with Shallow water being the more “sexy”, but also more unstable. some simulations only seem stable if you chose Terrain Mode - “Constant Water Depth”, for getting forces, etc. to work it seems to work to lower the resolution to “512”.
Foam, I think is generated by a color channel in the materials, but I haven’t managed to get any shore foam going, even though the Niagara shore “bouncing balls” works. One reason why we haven’t’ seen so much cool foam stuff in the samples is probably that they’re still working on the Niagara components.
There are some amazing possibilities by being able to access the WaterDistanceField and things in the Materials through the “WaterBodyData” node, there’s also a bunch of cool render targets for things like flow maps, water velocity, height, etc
But yeah, really tricky to juggle all the different numbers in the water body, materials, effect materials, resolutions, forces etc. I reckon they will make this more user-friendly over time. Wouldn’t be too hard to build something like the “SunSky” actor that packages everything nicely
I tried to get some results and got some but wasn’t satisfied coz it all looked a lot complicated… Many thanks team!!
