There are a lot of things that will affect this material that need to be included in your scene. If you were to look at the M_Water_01 material in the material editor you would see that the material is doing what it’s supposed to. It’s a rather dark water material. You can lighten the water material up by changing the Base Color node in the material editor to achieve a better look that you would like.
Some other things that you would need to add to your level to affect the material as well would be:
A Sky Light: This will lighten the scene with regards to your shadows making them more realistic rather than black
A box reflection capture: you can adjust the brightness to take in more from the scene. Make sure to hit “Update Caputers” in the detail panel. You’ll get reflections from the meshes in the scene that are near there as well. If you look at the rock and the wall you’ll see they are showing their reflections accordingly.
You can see the variations in the two images I made using the Original materials color and the adjusted lighter color.
Question Tim if you don’t mind. How come the foam doesn’t apply to other projects than the standard one?
EDIT: Managed to find out how it works… kind of, problem is I can’t paint the foam on either way.
EDIT2: I suspect I might be mentally challenged (I figured it out).
Migrate SM_Lake (materials and all with static mesh) to my blank project
Created BSP with Subtraction brush for my pool
Added SM_Lake
Opened Material and changed the water color to be more easily seen
Changed to “Paint Mode”
Changed brush settings and falloff
Hold Shift to paint foam and Ctrl to remove
Granted you don’t need to do all of that, but these are my steps to get the scene you see above.
If you’re still having trouble let me know. I didn’t have to do any setup or anything in 4.4 except to place my mesh and paint really.
You wouldn’t perhaps know of any ways to get a good transparency? I tried a depth fade but that seems to mess up reflections see pictures below, also any way to create waves that actually moves up and down to make it a bit more alive? I remember seeing someone with a solution for that (which looked okay with this water solution) but can’t seem to find it.
Depth fade and transparency enabled (doesn’t reflect things other than terrain):
Opaque blendmode, has good reflections but doesn’t look good due to lack of transparency:
To get “reflections” on translucent material you need to fake it with a cubemap.
Place a SceneCaptureCube at the middle of your water surface about ten UU above it.
In the content browser package of your choice right-click and find under “Materials & Textures” Cube Render Target
Assign the CRT to the SCC property “Texture Target”
By default the SCC updates every frame. You can turn this off in its properties if you want
Drag the CRT into your shader and multiply it with a Fresnel to simulate Angle Of Incidence effect. Change the AOI with the exponent value of the Fresnel. Higher number means higher AOI before the CRT is full bright.
Connect that to emissive slot
I find that leaving the normal input of the Fresnel empty works best.
To get a basic wave action you need a tessellated mesh
For waves copy my network. The wave length should be at least the distance of three vertices in world space otherwise it just looks bouncy. So if your mesh verts are 100 uu apart, make the divisor 200.