I’ve been making a game on Unreal Engine Version 4.24 and want to implement Fluid Simulations so I thought about using Nvidia Flex since it seems like the only viable option atm, but I realized it doesn’t work on versions after 4.19.2. It seems like it will be a pain in the butt to copy 4 weeks worth of programming to an older Unreal version just to make this thing work for my project.
I saw that Niagara in 4.25 is able to do fluid simulations on their youtube channel but they don’t explain how it’s done.
Should I go ahead and copy everything I did to the older version of Unreal or is there any other way to do fluid simulations on newer versions?
I want to make a pipe stream water to a pond to fill it with water
I would recommend you evaluate the different technology using various UE4 versions and a simple test project, rather than doing all of the work to port your game to that version before really establishing whether the various tech will serve your purpose.
It would not be surprising if you ended up ‘faking’ things rather than using an actual fluid sim. Or only using a sim for a small part of the system, and some fakery for the pond itself. eg you might bake the water as animated meshes and then use materials to make it look good enough, and a system to drive the baked animations in a suitable way.
The Niagara sim stuff is interesting but I think its probably too early for you, depending on timescale of your project completion. I think there is ongoing development of this stuff and that it is being worked on in the master branch on github. Specifically, they seem to be adding stuff to the ‘ShallowWater’ plugin which comes with UE4, to use Niagara emitters and grid sims for some water stuff. For example, here is a recent commit to the master branch and just by looking at the filenames there are plenty of clues: https://github.com/EpicGames/UnrealE…bfb1695bef3b32
So if you build the master branch from source, enable that plugin, show plugin & engine content in the content browser and then find the example maps within the ShallowWater plugin, you will be able to see where they are at with this stuff.