So this is more of a request than anything I guess. I have looked through multiple packages and have yet to find any great water materials/Shaders. One can spend weeks just playing and tweaking to get them right thus I usually just snake them from someone else that has done this. Yes there are some droplets, splashes and reflections etc but I am looking for more open water. Am I missing a package somewhere that might have what I am looking or does anyone have a good tutorial for making good water in UE4.
IE Oceans - Lakes - Ponds - Pools - Streams
Thanks in advance and I suppose if a end user driven marketplace was up and working someone would put a water package together I am sure.
There really isn’t anything right now, I’ve been labouring over my water shader for a couple of days. Translucency is just a bit sucky unfortunately, we need better translucent reflections.
IIRC Hourences did a nice Ocean for his Solus teaser, and I’ve recently been working on a ‘river’ which has some cool stuff going on. The trick seems to be having very very little specularity, and a good way to calculate opacity. In my example I’m using a depth-fog like attempt, but I’m also using a vector flow map and other stuff too, hence it looks more ‘real’. See the thread here: ?v=cd-ub_5BQc0&feature=youtu.be
Have you checked the water that is included with the starter content packages? That is the one that included some tiles, bricks and rocks. Should be at least one water shader that looks nice on a large surface. It might be a fairly basic water shader but it should help you get started if you haven’t seen it yet. If you have seen it, what shortcomings did you find that made is less valuable as an example material?
You could also just take a look at the UDK water tutorials -> just create them and fix the problems that might appear (because of the differences between UDK and the UE4)
Thanks for the replies I missed those I checked the reflections package figuring with all that water they would be in there. Gotem from the content examples and thanks. They are not the best but its a starting point.
I am afraid your right I am just being lazy I guess, well not really with how much work I have in front of me but I was hoping someone would have a buffet of waters and skies to just pull from and tweak from there rather than having to spend the time to do it all from scratch.
That thread is way over my head. But your trying to say the reason no one is really posting any up is because they really do not exist yet?
Is this also why I m having a problem displaying Materials on my plants not working they worked just fine in UDk3 but in 4 they are either not translucent or it only renders half the blade of grass or half the leaf etc.
Also I haven’t gotten decals really working yet they are not transparent.
I figured its probably because I just do not understand the shader for them yet and I haven’t put forth the effort to get it right. I knew how to do it in UDk3 just not 4 yet.
I think my water looks pretty kick (BLEEP). But because my graphic card is slightly outdated and doesn’t support tessellation, I cant get the actual wavy look.
I basically took the default water that comes with example. tweeked it and added in several more parts.
Shown below.
Basically I just created two separate textures, one had a low level panner and the main one had a rotate option with a timer and a sine for maximum control and then I lerped it into emissive.
It shows up on dx11 cards like actual baby Caribbean waves. Non dx11 looks kind of cool 2d texture.
I’ll be posting a techy-like video once the cinematic is done (well, not polished, but done, I’ve only got till tomorrow :()
However, I’m using a flow map, which is generated per-mesh and you need some third party tools. Search ‘Flow Map’ water on Google for more info, a guy called RedBox put together an .PDF with information on how to do it, but it’s very much an advanced method and isn’t easy. I used the same method that both he and Valve used with Houdini to generate the flow map, but if you search on the Polycount forums, somebody make a quick-and-dirty tool for Photoshop to paint them manually, though it’s probably harder to get as good/lifelike results.
I could still do a lot more with it. I think the best way to do reflections on water right now, is the old-school method, of adding it to the material manually. I’ll try a few things once this level is done.
I also have trouble with transparency, this new unreal engine is awsum, but udk was better/easier for making sea shaders.
Any transparency added to water and it looks like shiny goo. That may be postprocess fault, i did not yet discovered how to make good looking transparent water.
However i made non transparent sea shader that looks just fine (for now).
you have nice normal map setup there. Use crazy bump or something alike to extract heightmap from normals, or just use blue vector of your normals mix.
And feed it to worldposition offset, it will add that big wavy feeling to water, and if you sync it with normals (same textures, or their matching heightmaps)
you will get some big scale variation on reflection normals.
