Hello all, I have a landscape that has been sourced from a Height-map and has been applied as a Open World Landscape, with World Partition. The landscape is not of an island but is of a section of coastline at 8km in size it features a large harbor in the center and off to one side it begins to open up towards the ocean outside of the level. This harbor features many ins and outs of mini scooped bays with rock tips and sandy shores, anyway.
I have been looking at trying to use the new Water system for this scene, but I am running into several issues, first I notice:
-Water Body Custom - It gives you a Square Plane, which you can scale and so far I am using this as my main water source, even though it shows water under the terrain for the entire world.
-Water Body Lake - may work for any Lagoons However it conflicts with the Water Body Custom and tends to remove that existing water.
-Water Body Ocean - Appears to only suit if you have a scene with a single island in the center, via the hole in the center, as this is not part of an island it won’t suit this application. it also flattens your entire landscape except for what it determines to be an island in the center.
-Water Body River - Very heavy on the Memory usage with chances of draining your memory, (no crash) also it again removes the water from your existing Water Body Custom.
So with that said, for the above:
This Water system would only suit a world with a single island and the island would then have to be created after the water is applied, so no support for existing height-map landscapes, It will flatten and modify your existing landscapes.
There seems to be no support for bays or harbors, as it uses a spline to snap process to add rivers or streams, then lakes.
So how would be the way to get around this, as my world has a large harbor in the partial center with many scooped smaller bays off it, then have off each of these bays streams leading off and some small lakes or lagoons on the end of them. the landscape is from a Height-map. The Streams are shallow and go up hills.
What would be a better process or a better option for water in these cases, since the UE5 Water body’s seem to limit to a Single small simple island scene, only.
I also should add to that when you use the Lake, if you did not want it to modify your terrain, by unchecking the “Effects Landscape” check box, the water disappears leaving just the spline Only. So you cannot use it if you want to preserve your landscape including any underwater sculptured bottom.
I also noted too that once you have any of these water features added that you cannot sculpt any changes where the water splines have overlapped. Landscape will only Sculpt right up just before the Spline. Though after re-oping the level you will see the landscape changes but your river is then split apart, lowing the terrain does not repair the river spline water.
The Spline River, Lake also disapear when you have a Custom water overlapping in the same location, especially after you re-open your level.
The water system is still experimental so I realize that a lot of what’s planned for the future is not implemented yet. But I have the same situation as you. I have a number of landscapes that I want to surround with nice ocean that hugs the shorelines.
I can’t seem to find a good alternative to the new water system. Have you figured anything out?
I need a very simple coastline and only used 4 linear splines hugging the landscape. As you can see, mine also has a harbor and many river flows. Sometimes the water actors work but most times not. When they do magically work, UE eventually crashes on me.
I’ve heard the water actors work better when not sitting on the [world grid] origin in the Z axis and that both the landscape and water actor X/Y origins should be zeroed. In othe words landscape and water actor origins should be X=0, Y=0, Z offset above zero. I tried this too but it didn’t resolve anything.
Then there’s the “WaterZone” and “Landscape Water Brush Manager” actors, that have no real documentation or good tutorials for.
Is the “WaterZone” actor limited to it’s default “box extent” ? It would seem so. I have more luck (yes, luck…it’s hit and miss) when placing a river or lake inside the default WaterZone bounds. Yes, I extended that box slightly beyond my landscape to engulf it.
I’ve resorted to using a huge water plane with a custom caustics decal and post process volume for now. But this doesn’t solve the river issue. My rivers originate from the mountain base and flow towards “sea level” with varying elevations. No plane or volume outside the new water system will fix that.
Gaea generated this rendering but just imagine a surrounding ocean. I’ll post more screenshots of the issues in UE5.
Hello, well it seems now the checkbox on , don’t effect the landscape now seems to work, so you can now use the water body ocean on a height mapped landscape.
I also have now discovered how to remove the hole in the center they have by default for islands, this may be seen as a slight work around, but I found when I adjusted the splines to squeeze-up the hole the hole disappeared and there was no distortion in the water. It seems to work, so now we can use the water body ocean even if you have no island in the center.
The next issue however is the water height as I have not so far found away to raise the height to match the landscape water level, which I have posted here.
Generally, you just add a 4vert sheet thats 8km long and runs a very simple material which simulates the ocean at a distance.
When a single sheet is too heavy, you create an Ngon with N tris. Take a single tris, and distribute instanced copies aorund in a circle without gaps.
Solid terrain(s) are then generally continued for about 8km in low detail, so that when a player reaches the edge the world doesn’t just end.
8km is rather arbitrary.
It is drived off the fact we usually only see 5km in a percect plane to the horizon, and that possibly being on a tall building or flying may cause more distance to be needed. It reallly depends on the overall height of the map plus the flying altitude.
For inatance, if your map was from sea level to K2, you’d have to have much more than 8km past the boundry to prevent the world from looking like it just ends when overlooking from the highest point.
Now if your map requires it, you can also cut the number of Ngons that represent the distant ocean down so they only appear in the direction they should…
I suggest don’t use the new watersytem. It is not suited for existing height-map landscapes. Since UE4 I use a GIS workflow for waterbodies. With the GIS app like QGIS or in my case Global Mapper you can export the flat geometry as dxf files of the waterareas.
Setup your groudlayers for the landscape layers (see image) to your own likes.
The next step in the GIS app is to divide the geometry of the water areas in custom planes for eg. lakes, ocean, and canals. and export them as DXF. Import it in a 3D app (blender, sketchup) and convert to fbx.
You import these fbx custom planes in Unreal (see image)
and put a predifined watermaterial on it. You can alter the Z value of each individual waterarea to your likes. The only downside is it is a plane so no underwater caustics and you cannot use streaming rivers which have sloping elevations like eg from mountains.
My heightmap is 5km by 5km and the location is my home and birth village Lemmer in the Netherlands. It is quit flat terrain and a lot of ground under waterlevel and a lot of waterareas from big to small.
As far as I can see I find this the best approach. It is time intensity but worth it.
There are some paid plugins to automate and customize the proces but you still need to prepare the gis data.
I hope you can use this information.
A printscreen of my area see image
