Will do. Side question, when you say [quote]Is your landscape encompassed entirely by the water zone?[/quote] you mean X and Y, yes? I don’t have to submerge the entire landscape and try to work from there I assume…
Portions of my map ARE above the water zone… but the zone itself spreads beneath the entirety of the map.
EDIT: no, it doesn’t appear to be the shaders. Nothing loading and it’s been 5 minutes with no change… that said, I haven’t tried the map thing mentioned a few steps back… let’s see if that changes anything…
The water zone is an area cube, so it has to entirely cover your map, just like a navigation mesh. The bottom of the water zone has to be lower than the entirety of your map, and the top of the water zone must be higher than your highest water location. Just have the center (the Z) being the ocean’s water level. If your map is forcibly raised outside of the height map you may have distortions.
*EDIT: I have confirmed one thing: on portions of my map where the landmass is closer to the water level, I can create lakes using the lake tool and the water appears as it should. On portions of my map where the landmass is higher than the water level, no dice. This makes sense when assuming that the water level is a flat plane (which it is) rather than following the contour of my landmass. I’d prefer the latter but it just might not be feasible? I can’t imagine a feature be that limited tho.
So good news now we have the brush manager being picked up, just that the materials aren’t showing, which is odd since the WaterMesh from the waterzone is rendering just fine. Generally we see this when the waterzone’s area doesn’t encompass the whole map (example below). Is that box on the right the water zone indicator?
The center of the box should be where the gizmo is, so I don’t think that’s it. Try to find the edges to the water zone’s cube and make sure it surrounds the entirety of your level from the highest high to the lowest low, world partion + water has it’s quirks a bit, but it should still handle it regardless of height as long as the lake itself is inside the water zone. After that we can move onto fixing the water zone tile sizing so you don’t get the mesh water in your land. (You can see I have adjusted mine to be smaller so it showed a bit of a better indicator).
The waterzone does cover the entirety of the map. It’s hard to tell in this image, but I flew around the corners and the whole island is encompassed by the cube.
Ahhh then it is likely the mesh water’s starting tile size causing the issue. Go into your water zone and play with the tilesize number till you see the mesh water recede just past you’re landmass like how you saw in my example.
The instance shouldn’t be the cause unless you generated it yourself and the lake you dragged in didn’t, but in your case it’s hooked up. After extending it past your landmass are the lakes working on anywhere within that zone?
Awesome! So the “ocean” from before is actually just a mesh that’s used for distance visuals, it doesn’t actually do anything as it’s attached to the water zone. The ocean volume is a bit different. By default, everything inside the spline will be raised to the spline level, and everything outside of it will descend the further out uniformly.
You can swap between how the ocean layers on top of it, but that’s pointless as you have a pre-made heightmap. So you have a number of options, but I’ll just take you through what I believe to be the best for your situation (to save you time and pain, if it doesn’t work out we can go into the more technical means).
In your case, you don’t need the ocean to depress the land, you already have your land contours setup. You could turn off the bool AffectsLandscape (for just the ocean, lakes and rivers need this to function right). and you can just have it sit at sea level like it should and cause no problems. You would also need to shrink/hide the spline under a mountain/hill and you’ll be golden. (can’t delete it as the brush demands it).
Awesome! Finally getting closer to what I need. Again, thank you.
I have backgrounds I can use to hide the spline easily enough, and procedural foliage to ‘encapsulate’ the world view… but I do have a question about the water tool when it comes to lakes, etc. Although it is editing the landscape as it should, the water level of the lake is very low…
There’s multiple ways to pull it off! If you want find control and sculpting you’re going to want to look into a few key things. If you already have locations and such for your lakes mapped on the terrain and you don’t want them to affect it? You can untick the bool, BUT it’s harder to get it to look good that way. It might be better to swap over to Max blend mode, it will allow you to raise the terrain around the lake and still sculpt around it to make it how you’d like.
Then when you want to handle the depth, it’s a good bit of fine tuning. There’s so many things to work with, I highly recommend combing through and playing with them to know exactly how they all work.
We’ll go through a bit in order to make sure you know how to make the lakes deeper/more customized.
The falloff settings will also help you get your cubic lake edges to be cleaner when working if you do keep affects landscape on. I prefer width over angle myself but not always.
No worries! The plugin does have a ton more to go over, so if you get stuck feel free to reach back out. I’ve marked the solution for this thread since we’ve gotten you fully up to speed. Let me know if this is in error or if you need any help. Have fun!
