Hello. I am having a TERRIBLE time with the water system in UE 5.0. What I want is simple: add a lake or river body, have the system automatically adjust the landscape to accommodate the water, and move on. What I am experiencing, however, is the water body A) NOT adjusting the landscape and B) hovering several meters above my landscape regardless of low I attempt to bring my water body element. I don’t mind using planes and cube meshes to create certain bodies of water, but for long rivers in large maps, etc. I’d like to use the water system.
Hey there @RLK_III! Could it be that your landscape doesn’t have edit layers enabled? The Water system uses edit layers and landscape brushes to accomplish the conforming the landscape to the water.
Hrm, generally when it’s floating like that and not affecting the landscape, it tends to be either that edit layers are off or the “Affects Landscape” bool on the water component is off.
There was an issue on 5.0 originally that incredibly large landscapes sometimes had problems delegating the brush over many proxies, how large is your landscape and how many heightmap layers does it have currently?
Are you using the landmass plugin? As I’ve seen reports that it’s not compatible with the landscape water system.
It is large, yes. I am going for an open-world exploratory map for RPG. My current scale is (X=991.080278,Y=1269.531250,Z=546.875000) ((Side note: I am also having issues with procedural foliage due to world partitions, but I am about to recreate the map minus this feature to see if that resolves the issue))
And yes, I have the Landmass plugin active. Are you suggesting I disable this?
From the cursory forum research I did into the matter it seems to suggest that Landmass and the water system aren’t compatible, but I’m currently spinning up a scene to test that myself. The instability with large worlds stems from refreshing/writing/reading the height map on construct(tick when editing it) (which can be INSANELY large with large worlds). So I doubt that’s currently the case, but not to be ruled out.
It does create a waterzone (usually), but that zone is usually far beneath the landscape. I’ve tried lowering my landscape to 0 Z but still get the same issue. It’s never worked right for me for some reason. For lakes it’s not so bad - I can just use a plane and water mats. Rivers are more difficult for some reason
Side note: I managed to get the foliage spawner to work so… yay!
Make sure the water zone covers the entirety of your landscape (and more) if possible.
Is your landscape encompassed entirely by the water zone?
Find the water brush manager in the outliner and check if the heightmaps are there and resemble your landscape for both your actual map and the small map test from before.
Still a little confused… (sorry - I am rather new at this).
It appears that my heightmap is not linked to the waterbrushmanager. However, I can’t seem to find a way to select it and link it, either. I tried to drag my heightmap (from WorldMachine) to the RTA and RTB slots, but it didn’t work. I can’t seem to find a tutorial on how tyo do this either. Do you know of one?
No worries, that check was to see if the brush is attached. It’s definitely not if none of those maps are there. It just helps us inform our next move.
So I’ve never seen this occurrence so this is going to be a bit trial and error trying to get the brush reapplied. So open up your landscape mode, and go over to sculpt and blueprint mode. It should have a layer called water, and once you click that layer is there an entry for the landscape_WaterBrushManager like mine?
I just can’t seem to create lakes or rivers in the landscape using the water tool. As I said, I can use planes and water materials, and will if need be, but I was hoping to use the auto tool…
Hrm, that box is usually only ever missing if edit layers isn’t turned on for the landscape. Open a new empty open world map, then create a landscape with edit layers turned on initially, then check back for the blueprint brush?
Does this mean I can’t make it work on an already existing map, even if I ensure edit layers is on now? I mean, I can re-install and re-paint the map, etc. but what a pain lol
EDIT: Fixed it. Had to dig around but I found the issue. It seems that, although i HAD clicked enable edit layers previously, it was NOT selected when digging through the landscape details. Argh! Thanks for that.
After some testing, enabling edit layers from the details panel of the landscape does bring it back on on 5.0.3 and 5.1.1 on both world partitioned and world composition levels. Try disabling edit layers, closing your project. Reopening the project then reenabling edit layers and checking. It’s definitely not the intended function.
So I created a new level. Added NOTHING but the landscape, directional light and water body… same issues and still no water layer. Totally confused now. I have to be doing something wrong but I have no idea what.
I see your water landscape brush has a 1 afterward, did you drop a new one in there? it’s likely a broken reference. Delete that, your lake, and water zone. Save the map, then drag in a brand new lake, it should regenerate both the water zone and the landscape brush on it’s own while your edit layers are active.
