HI @Br0kenWing ,
From what I understand, for a third-person game I’d recommend using the Water Plugin, especially if water is part of the world and the player can interact with it directly, like with a swimming system.
The plugin already lets you create oceans, rivers, and lakes that feel natural without having to build everything from scratch. The character can enter the water, swim, and exit, and everything stays visually consistent from a third-person camera, which is important when the player is constantly viewing the environment from different angles.
Another big advantage is that the water automatically adapts to the terrain and keeps a consistent look across the whole level. This saves a lot of time, since you don’t need to constantly tweak materials, edges, or water heights by hand.
On the other hand, Niagara is mainly used for visual effects, such as bubbles, splashes, foam, spray, or local water interaction around the character. It doesn’t handle swimming logic or underwater gameplay by itself, and works best as a visual layer on top of an existing water system.
Within Niagara, the Niagara Fluids plugin is quite interesting for creating more advanced water simulations and effects, but as mentioned before, it’s still focused on visuals rather than gameplay.
Additionally, I’m sharing the documentation for the Water System and Water Debugging and Scalability Options.
The first one explains how to use the water system properly, and the second highlights that the system includes debug commands, viewport visualizations, and scalability options, which are very useful for checking stats, analyzing performance, and tuning the system per platform:
“The Water system contains its own commands useful for displaying relevant information in the Level Viewport for debugging purposes, for providing visualizations, and for setting scalability options for your project.”
I’m also linking a video that explains how to build a Swimming System, in case it helps as a reference or starting point.
When it comes to console performance:
- The Water Plugin is usually the less demanding and more stable option. It’s designed with LOD, culling, and scalability options in mind, which allows you to adjust the visual cost of the water as needed.
- Niagara, especially when using GPU systems or Niagara Fluids, can become more expensive if overused or if it’s applied to simulate large water areas.
And finally, I’m also sharing a forum post about “What are the costs of GPU Particles”, which discusses how to optimize Niagara systems to avoid performance issues.
I hope this helps, and if you have any questions, don’t hesitate to ask on the forum , someone will surely be able to help you with whatever you need!