Hi my son is using ue5 on a MacBook Pro M1 Pro and can’t get the water to work properly. Enabled water and followed some tutorials on YouTube but the water just waves about not in the place you want it for a bit and then disappears. Can’t get it to sit in a part of the landscape that I’ve sculpted to hold a lake. Any ideas?
Hey there @! Welcome to the community! We’re talking about the new water plugin right?
Could we see the water’s effect and how it disappearing? And which tutorial you guys followed? It may give a bit of a clue as to what happened. I haven’t seen too many issues with this one yet so this might be a bug report by the end of it.
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Ok , video 1 and 2 are just a new level , basic. Wouldn’t show the water on both of them. The third video is on an open world where it does show but has the horrible jagged lines where it meets the land. Tried to smooth it out using landscape smooth and also paint smooth. Neither works.
Its not as sluggish as it appears in the video. Just think its dropbox being daft.
The tutorial I followed was… Let's Build the RPG! - 16 - Unreal Engine 5 Water System Beginner Tutorial - Lakes and Rivers - YouTube
Anyone?
Hello, did you find how to get it working?
Nope. Waiting for some help on here 
Hey @! Sorry for the late reply, my hours are a bit sporadic and the list is every growing. So For your first 2 videos, you’re using a static mesh as the ground. The system itself can only work with the landscape system as of this point in time, sorry!
So for the 3rd video it looks like either the terrain’s poly resolution is lower, and the water is just shape matching. I’m compiling the shaders for my own little water world now so I’ll be able to work out a fix for you soon!
Alright so it looks like the automatic deformation that comes from the plugin sometimes cuts into landscapes. There’s a setting in here that causes those ruts if the terrain itself isn’t high enough density to cut into. That said you will need to handle the terrain deformation by hand, which I don’t think is a bad thing here. Just remember, some of the water must be overlapped and slightly raised from the water point so the corners don’t make an appearance.
After disabling that everything looked fine.
Also hello welcome to the community @anonymous_user_6d4f758a!
Hope this helps!
Ok , just created a new level (blank) , went to the landscape and created a 2x2. Did a water lake and it still didn’t work. Just patchy waves, nowhere near where the shape of the water is. I made the area of water smaller and tried to position it over the landscape and t just doesn’t do anything. Could this be a bug just on Mac?
Oh! That makes more sense, alright thank you for the video! So do me a favor and try to create a new landscape with this setting checked on. This allows nondestructive layers to exist for the landscape itself. The plugin relies on this to function for the most part.
Let me know how that goes!
Still not working for me. It does now show when I’ve enabled layers as you mentioned but trying to make the body of water smaller to fit what I want isn’t working. The white shape line is there but the orange border is way bigger and can’t see how to do that. Also the water is still affecting the landscape and creating the ruts and weird shapes. Even if I move it and shrink the size down , its still keeping the landscape as its all dented in. Could you please do a screenshot of your settings on the landscape, water etc and let em know how I can turn off “affect landscape” so it doesn’t automatically do that? Matt
So with a bit more testing it looks like it requires affect landscape to actually function as expected. I’m thinking the harsh landscape shape for you may stem from the landscape being a bit small. I did get some weird effects across the board as well. I’ll show you how I generally use the plugin. Try these settings with the terrain and the lake and compare how they react.
I set this to max so that I can hand carve the terrain, and have the water just populate where I want it. It has downsides if you want to have it raised, but embedded bodies of water are perfect with it.
Right , I’ve got it to work now apart from I can’t move the height of the water to fill the trench I’ve just sculpted (shift sculpt). Its just showing a little bit of the water at the bottom of the trench. See pic…
Something else , what’s the orange line around your water? I click on that and it doesn’t show me any details pane for that to adjust. That might be why mine isn’t working as the orange is tiny , the big white shape is massive
No problem, all questions are valid here. So the orange lines you see are the mesh bounds. Usually just highlights the edges of the mesh you can see. Which is why in my shot you can see that it’s the shape of the part I sculpted into the terrain. In reality we know if we dug more anywhere within the white spline bounds (the lakes actual bounds) we would also get more water there.
You might be grabbing the control points and trying to lift. The control points are constrained to the plane wherever the lake itself is. Try to grab the lake object itself in the hierarchy and then use the transform gizmo (or adjust it directly in the details if you’d like). The settings I showed with the blend mode set to max allows you to just work with the terrain you’ve sculpted for the most part. However the terrain under the lake will raise to wherever the water volume ends depth wise.
Set up OBS again so I can show off how I use this set up in conjunction with depth and raising or lowering the water.
let me know if you have any more questions or issues!
Still not working for me. The water is showing fine now without carving the landscape but trying to adjust height etc doesn’t do anything. Please see the attached video.
Ahhh so it wasn’t just the affect terrain setting that causes that to occur, on your system it’s doing it regardless. Should be re-rendering based on the location. In the meantime I’ll get our macbook set up with UE5 and test this there to verify it’s MacOS specific or not. Definitely leaning towards a bug considering the circumstances.