Two-sided translucent water material

Development World Creation
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1

Hi,

does anyone have tips for creating a two-sided translucent water material? I would like to be able to see the surface from underwater as well. I searched the internet, but couldn’t find anything very helpful.

2

Try the following:

  1. Enabled the Two-Sided flag on the Material
  2. Take the existing mesh used to display the water and flip it upside down so that you have one mesh on the top and one on the bottom. You can see an example of this in the following video, Interactive 2D Fluid Simulations in Unreal | GDC 2017 | Unreal Engine - YouTube.
3

Hello,

thanks for the reply, but I managed to create a custom water material that is translucent as well as two-sided. I included it into a Blueprint. However, I have several questions concerning this:

  1. When will we be able to integrate a Physics Volume into a Blueprint?
  2. Is it possible to make the volumes underneath the water surface align to the latter? I really need that as my water deforms because of world position offset. When a wave comes, it has no water effect with it because the Post Process Volume has static boundaries only, of which the upper one is exactly on the level of the water surface.
  3. Can you make the effects of a Post Process Volume be visible from the outside? I mean that you already see it when the camera is above the water surface.
4

Does noone have an answer to at least one of these three questions? It would be great. :slight_smile:

5
  1. Try a box collision and create the logic yourself for whatever you want to do.
  2. Can’t you just make the volume bigger?
  3. You can set it to be unbound and it will apply everywhere.
6

Thanks for your reply.

  1. Either I do that or I add in a Physics Volume manually everytime. I just asked this question because I once read somewhere that they wanted to implement this feature, but it hasn’t happened so far. Although I haven’t tried it out yet, I don’t think it comes with the lately released version 4.17.
  2. No, I can’t. Well, actually I can, but that makes absolutely no sense for what I want to achieve. If I did this, the underwater effect would be above the surface and that doesn’t bring me any further. I am not so sure if you understood me correctly. What I wanted to know is if volumes like a Post Process Volume or a Physics Volume can deform according to something like a water surface that also deforms due to world position offset.
  3. That is not what I meant. I don’t want the Post Process Volume to be unbound. It shall be that the effect becomes visible INSIDE of the area where it is, when you look at it from the outside. So far, you can only see it when “diving” into it. Know what I mean?
7

Post process volumes don’t work that way. You will probably have a better time using post process materials.

8

Thank you for your answer. I will take that into consideration. :slight_smile: