Water texture rendering in editor but in game has no texture?

[WillMead13 (Wilko)]

I’m having an issue where, even though the water plane texture is rendering in the engine editor, whenever I press play it removes the textures? I don’t currently have a post processor, does anyone know if one of these are necessary for water rendering?

Thanks!

[BRGEzedeRocco]

Hi @WillMead13 ,
When you press Play, you can see a message that says “Reflection Captures need to be rebuilt,” and that could be directly related to why the water isn’t looking right in-game. That warning basically means the engine hasn’t recalculated how reflections should work on the level’s static objects yet.

You could try this: go to the Build menu and select Build Reflection Captures. Once it finishes, run the level again and check if the water looks correct.

Hope it helps!

[WillMead13 (Wilko)]

Hi! I rebuilt the reflections! (thanks for tell me how, that little message has been driving me crazy ahaha) although it didn’t fix the problem,

ALTHOUGH I figured out something else about the issue- it’s based on how far player 1 is to the water-

If player one is far away, the water won’t render but if they’re closer it will- I’m not sure how to make the water render based on either player’s location rather than just player one?

[BRGEzedeRocco]

Haha, nice, glad you managed to get rid of that message

About the water disappearing when Player 1 moves away, you could try the following: select the water mesh, go to the Details panel, find the Rendering section, and increase the Bounds Scale value. Try 3 or 5 first to see if that fixes the issue. You can also enable “Never Distance Cull,” which tells Unreal that this component should not stop rendering based on its distance from the camera.

It could also be related to LODs (Level of Detail). LODs are simplified versions of a mesh that the engine uses when the object is farther away, to improve performance. The issue is that sometimes a distant LOD can have a different material, fewer polygons, or even UV problems, which can make the water look wrong or disappear at certain distances. You could check the LOD settings on the water’s Static Mesh.

Another possibility is that the issue isn’t with the water mesh itself, but with the Landscape LOD, as mentioned in that post. When the terrain changes LOD, its shape or depth can shift slightly, and that can sometimes create visual problems for surfaces that are very close to it, like water.

Single Layer Water disappears at distance

The problem was never the water but the landscape’s LODs changing to be far less accurate at a diatance. If you use the landacape/water system, this is what you get with shallows. You can try to brute force the LODs from shifting up/down too much by setting the height of the shallow at exact mathemarical even numbers. So the Z would be -10 instead of -10.53610 for instance. Still, the LOD will drastically mutate, causing effects like this when intersecting planes. A quick test to verify the…

[WillMead13 (Wilko)]

Thanks so much, the bounds thing completely fixed it!