Physical Water Surface

Hello ,
does this work on the Nintendo Switch?

I can’t officially confirm this because I don’t have a Nintendo Switch to try it out, and I don’t have reports from customers who used it on the Switch. But I have also have never received reports from customers saying that it doesn’t run on console, so I would say the probability is high that Physical Water Surface works also on the Switch. I’m sorry that I can’t be more helpful!

Some customers have reported the problem that the water surface does stay gray and the water does not appear after the shaders have finished compiling. Affected engine versions seem to be 4.19 and higher.
Today I finally was able to replicate this issue and I think I have the solution. If you have this problem, please make sure to use the following steps when adding Physical Water Surface to your project:

  1. Add Physical Water Surface to your project as usual from the Launcher
  2. In the Engine a little message may appear in the bottom right corner of the screen saying “3 changes to source content files have been detected…”
  3. You need to close this message by clicking on “Don’t Import”. Physical Water Surface will still be added when you click this option, and everything will work as expected.
  4. Open one of the maps that come with Physical Water Surface (for example DemoMap). The water will appear after the shaders have finished compiling.

The water shaders will need a few minutes to compile when Physical Water Surface is used for the first time. During this time the water surface also stays gray and does not appear yet. I found that the “compiling shaders” message in the Engine is not very reliably and sometimes disappears too early while the shaders are still compiling. A more reliable indicator is to observe the CPU load of your operating system. If the CPU load is high, this means that the shaders are still compiling.

I will add all of this information to the Wiki pageonce they turn on editing again in the Wiki.
Please let me know if the steps above solve this issue for you! In case you’re still having problems, please feel free to contact me. You can find the support email addresson the Marketplace page.

Anyone managed to get atmospheric fog working in forward shaded instanced stereo VR?

The cut off even in the default demo scene is very harsh:

Physical Water Surface is compatible with the newest engine version 4.22. I’ve noticed though that the default water color appears to be quite dark in 4.22 (the color can be manually adjusted with the ColorBright and ColorDark material parameters). I’ll quickly try to make an update that fixes this issue and gives the same default water color for all engine versions.

Physical Water Surface - Quick Tips #1: Improving an existing Water Material

It is possible (and actually a very good idea) to apply the realistic water motion of Physical Water Surface to an existing water material. This is a quick and easy way to significantly improve the look of a water surface in existing projects without starting over from scratch.
This tutorial explains in detail how to combine an existing water shader with the water motion from Physical Water Surface. The results speak for themselves:

watch?v=n9TFqB5waZA

I am having trouble with Physical Ocean Surface in 4.22 - it never builds and stays grey. What do I do?

I’m sorry that you’re having this issue. Please try to follow the steps from this post, it could be the same issue. Let me know if that doesn’t solve the problem for you!

Physical Water Surface - Quick Tips #2: Creating a Custom Water Plane Mesh

One of the most important decisions that should be taken as early as possible in your project is if you want to use a custom water plane mesh. In general, under the following circumstances a custom water plane mesh should be used:

  • You want to use Mesh Paint to paint foam or (other things) on the water surface
  • You don’t need to use the Infinite Ocean System
  • The size of the water surface is limited, for example just one island. You intend to adapt the shape of the water plane mesh to the shape of the island.

Before creating your own water plane mesh please read this section in the FAQ. And also remember that you will need to disable the Infinite Ocean System (which would otherwise move and scale the water plane depending on the camera position).

I’ve found how to fix the issue of the water surface appearing too dark in newer engine versions: In the Details panel of the PostProcessVolume, go to the Exposure section and disable the “Min EV100” and “Max EV100” options.

Update 5 - Released on April 18, 2019

Im curious on something, is it possible to have “two” oceans in a scene, but with different settings?

What i mean is that i want two different oceans in once scene, but in one area the water is calm while the other the water is slightly rougher.

By dragging two ocean planes in, it is possible to have two oceans, but since the controller is mapped to both of them, they are both the same.

I was wondering if anyone has had any success in duplicating the controller and ocean plane, but having each unique?

Oh and im also curious if anyone has had any success creating a wake esc effect using this ocean?

This should be possible. To achieve this you need to modify the WaterPlane Blueprint. Please have a look in the Construction Script where you can find very simple code that tries to find the WaterSettings Blueprint. You need to make two different WaterPlane Blueprints and modify the Construction Script so that the correct WaterSettings object is found. For example, you could create a new variable to store a reference to the correct WaterSettings Blueprint.
In case you’re using the Buoyancy Blueprint you also need to modify it so that the correct WaterSettings is found (depending on which WaterPlane the object is floating in).
Please let me know if you need more assistance with this approach.

I can also share some information about the upcoming translucency update:

  • The update will be only available for engine version 4.22 and higher so that I can make use of planar reflections (and some other new engine features that might be useful in future updates)
  • Planned features (non-exhaustive list) are planar reflections and caustics
  • I also plan to bring shore interaction with this update because it makes sense to develop this together with translucency

Hey man, bought this amazing plugin a while back and I’m really impressed at how well it works!

I have a few questions regarding this plugin that I believe I can find by looking around for a while but would like your input on them (trying to potentially look at some sort of boat racing game)

  1. I’ve noticed that the default settings make the boat stop as soon as it hits something that it could potentially slide up (such as a ramp), is this something one can adjust?

  2. Increasing the speed of which a boat moves at (for example the one that comes with the project) makes it also tilt forward a lot, is there a way to prevent that or even make it tilt backward instead?

  3. Any suggestion to keep the camera from going underwater? I have changed the camera to be controllable by the player and tried a quick fix by changing collision but might have to do some math to solve it.

Thanks!

Please excuse my late reply, somehow I’ve overlooked your post.

  1. Please assign a Physical Material to the boat and to the ramp meshes and set a low friction value.
  2. Please try to change the ForceCenter property of the PawnBoat. The ForceCenter (the location at the boat where the forwards force is applied) should be close the center of mass of the boat. You can also experiment with moving the ForceCenter up and down. The LinearDamping in the Buoyancy settings also influences how much the boat will tilt.
  3. You can edit the WaterPlane Blueprint like this: In the “Custom” Collision Preset, set Pawn to Blocked. However this will still make the camera go underwater when there are high waves. But you could use the WaterHeight Blueprint to find out the wave height at the camera location and move the camera up when the water level is going up.

No worries man, thank you so much for your reply it really helps a lot!

Once again, thanks for an amazing plugin and I hope we can get that transparency soon, love how the water in Sea of Solitude looks and works and that was made in Unity afaik, not sure how they made the deforming of the water though…

Physical Water Surface is compatible with the latest engine version 4.23. Please let me know if you should encounter any problems.

Is there an example anywhere of someone who has added a planar reflection that works in forward shaded mode to this water surface?

Also, I tried to combine this water with another asset, and it is quite noticeable that it doesn’t extend very far. I get that a physical simulation can’t extend far, but is there a way to fake the water all the way to the horizon?

Actually, the Infinite Ocean System should do a fine job of creating the impression of an infinite ocean. The water plane is moved and scaled with the camera so that the horizon is always very far away. Did you enable the Follow Camera option (see here)](A new, community-hosted Unreal Engine Wiki - Announcements - Epic Developer Community Forums)?