Hello, is there a way to create procedural water with Cubes instead of fluid particles?
a. Can the cubes “not” pass through each other?
There isn’t any way to create “procedural water” in the stock engine.
There isn’t any “with cubes” or any other solid shape.
Mostly this is because why would you?
It’s expensive as it is as a single sheet of vertex displaced by a shader…
The best you can do within unreal is pull an old enough version source off Git, pull the latest avalaible version of Nvidia Game Works you can find, build both into one another and use the fluid sim it comes with.
Its got some sort of particle setup to drive the top sheet of water with, however the intricacies of it lie in reading and knowing how to modify source code.
Next best thing is not “simulating” fluids at all. Faking it works fine in 99.9% of cases. And I dare to say the other .1% are scientific study simulations that are better off Not in engine in the first place?
You have a variety of techniques to choose from, from Distance to Nearest Surface (which was broken recently) to manually capturing a flowmap into a render target to get displacement going (usually of normals, not of vertex, because again in 99.9 of cases faking it looks better).
I believe the built in water for unreal uses at least some sort of flowmap/render target system, but you’d have to study up on that (and it isn’t worth anyone’s time imho since you can easily make a better/much more performant system).
Making the water shared and getting the light right is complex.
Unreal’s single layer water added somewhere around .24 is a decent compromise…
Basically consistinf of:
Not doing things yourself, finding out later that making your own USF is faster, playing with shader code until your usf works… and eventually finding that the single layer water they just added (which wasnt out when you started) is only slighlty less performant than your work…
That should be about all you need to get things going…
The 3rd best thing may be Fluid Ninja? People seem to like it for smoke sims.