Hi! I am new to unreal and game design in general. I come from an architectural background and have decided to explore game design. So far learning unreal has been great and there are a lot of nifty built in tools and addons.
The water tool seems to be still in beta, and certainly needs some work fixing bugs and quirky issues, however I wanted to note some functional changes it could use
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Ocean mask. Currently you can make a perfectly shaped little island and flat underwater with this tool, however, in many cases it seems height maps are used for terrains or a terrain may already exist that you created. What would be nice is if you could draw a shape and have the ocean volume generate where you draw it. It could then be edited similar to the island with little nodes, but would NOT affect landscape. A similar option should be done for lakes, but i think the custom water surface probably works for this.
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River Mask, similar to the ocean there should be an option to create a water volume with a spline just like the regular river, but it doesn’t affect the landscape so you can use it to fill in rivers you sculpt.
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flow directions - This would be helpfull to make sure waves are properly approaching land. it should be done visually maybe by placing a flow actor that will tell the ocean which directions get waves? This could also be usefull for river flow, but that only really has 2 directions where as an ocean may need to flow in multiple directions.
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tooltips for some of the functions for the water. there are a few I would like to edit but am not sure which functions in the water material handle them. These include
- How to activate underwater?
- How to adjust how the water looks the deeper you get. I can change the Anisotropy which seems to determine how “dark” it is, and the absorbtion for color, but what i want is to have the water crystal clear closer to beaches or in a “spring” area, and have a deeper color the further out we go. it seems to get a clear looking water you have to have the absorbtion color more faded but then it looks off.
- Videos show an older version had the ability to adjust the foam called bubbles or something, the newer version doesn’t have this and not sure if it’s been renamed or just gone.