Now starting to experiment with the new water system, which is really cool, I found the same problems. I did expect, that I can just add WaterBody actors to places in an already sculpted landscape, e.g. a lake on a mountain, but it does not work. If for example a lake is added at a higher elevation, there’s even no water getting rendered at all, but just landscape deformations appear.
There are lot of parameters, and I played with them, but always landscape gets deformed. From what I understand, that’s how the system is designed, using the LandMass plugin, which deforms the existing landscape.
From what I found, the only way to get it working:
- start with a new terrain, keep it flat AND make it large enough (using defaults works, trying to make it smaller did cause strange problems for me)
- Keep this one flat, place the ocean and lake(s) - works like a charm on a flat terrain
- Tune the ocean parameters for falloff etc…
- Elevate the lake(s) WaterBody actors - this creates landscape deforms, defined by parameters of the lake water bodies
- Now in Landscape mode: add a NEW layer on top
- In this new layer, you now can sculpt the landscape and the waterbodies behave correctly
This does not solve the issue, that adding water bodies in an already existing landscape destroys all sculpt work done before. And also, changing water body actors parameters later on also affects the landscape again - so ending up in adding a new layer again and again to fix sculpting.
So I’m also somewhat confused about the workflow as it is meant to be. Will need to watch some tutorials again, especially the one by Sjoerd de Jong, now with having some own experiences.
BTW: I thought, it might be useful to start a discussion about the many water system parameters and their meaning: Unreal Water System - meaning of all those parameters - General Discussion - Unreal Engine Forums