Hello all. I’m hoping there’s a genius or three out there.
After struggling with UE’s broken water system I finally bit the bullet and purchased a water system (WaterlinePRO). It’s great, but I only found out AFTER purchase that it has no current coding to serve as a river. Lakes and oceans, yes, but rivers… nope.
Undaunted (and refusing to tell my wife I spent $100 on something that doesn’t fit my needs LOL) I have been trying to make it work. It has TONS of customization when it comes to the water color and effects, and as you can see here it looks pretty good.
It doesn’t slope. It works on a flat plane only. I would LOVE to get it to work with splines but I am not experienced enough with UE to even fathom if this is possible. I would imagine it is, as I have seen splines used for a multitude of things, but moving rivers?
I reached out to the creator of the program and although he has assured me that there is no immediate plans on a river function but do hope to have them in the future (X_X) I may be able to “get something river like by modifying the infinite watersim actor’s water surface material in order to have flowmaps, but those will need to be made externally as well.”
This is gobbldygook to me. Is there an adult to help me with this?
Hey there @RLK_III! Here’s a resource on flowmaps and applying them in Unreal! Hopefully the wife will be proud when she hears you’re not only adept at level design but also VFX and tech art! Which by the end of this journey, you very well may be. Combining the flowmaps for the material and making the master actor a spline based setup, you can likely adapt what they have to your needs!
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No worries! Let me know if it works out! Also here’s some resources on making the spline/mesh portion of the river if you wanted to use landscape splines (which may still be susceptible to the height issue but that is yet untested) or if you wanted to make them via custom splines you could do that instead! It would have a bit more effort and custom sculpting though.
Disclaimer: One or more of these links are unaffiliated with Epic Games. Epic Games is not liable for anything that may occur outside of this Unreal Engine domain. Please exercise your best judgment when following links outside of the forums.
Depends on how that plugin handles it’s materials really, if it’s got a bunch of logic for fluid sim, you can cut it completely out of the material unless you intend to use it. Flow maps aren’t extremely expensive, but they do bump complexity a bit.
Yes once you get everything how you’d like it, you can disable it in the viewport as not to deal with it while working on the rest, but I would recommend a test build and stress test with some gameplay before continuing just to see where the baseline performance is at.
I wouldn’t worry too much about shader complexity unless you’re getting bottlenecked graphically. Shader complexity is measured a bit deceptively, in that you can have it glowing in the high complexity area with a ton of adds that cost very little, or you could have a couple of square root and sine operations and it will be nice and green on the complexity chart, but cost effectively more cycles.
As for your fog issue, it looks like volumetric fog is applying or some form of post processing, but you’d already checked both. So it’s possible it could be some function of your lighting or scatter. How does it look from a player perspective? Does it disappear when dropping to medium scalability?
