Hey there!
I am trying to get some very rudimentary simulation of water flowing through a translucent pipe. This is just for a small game demo, so it does not even have so simulate any fluids. All I want to do, is be able to enable the water flow and have some representation of the water flowing through the pipe. I am fine with it being just a rectangle (or some other primitive shape) that expands as it flows through the pipe. The path the water needs to take does not have to be calculated, I can manually place waypoints for the water to follow. However, I would like it to automatically stop, if there is a wall in the way. I.e. if I shove some solid mesh through the pipe, the water should stop flowing. Similarly, I would like the water to automatically fill out the pipe. Also, if there is a junction, I would like the water to split. I can also give waypoint for this, if necessary.
If it’s possible to have some “movement”, it would be great, like having air bubbles in the water so that it does not just look like some static translucent material.
I am very new to UE, so I don’t really know where to start. I would appreciate any pointers to what the basic steps are to achieve something like this.
Apologies for this kind of unstructured question, I guess I am a bit confused myself 
Edit: I looked at the marketplace several times but now I found something that solves this, I think: Flow generator in Visual Effects - UE Marketplace
Judging by this info the wall can be placed there, or the pipe can change, in unreal, so you can’t just do a mesh animation in blender and import that.
If you need it for gameplay:
I’m thinking of something else then, possibly you can use a spline. splines are paths made from points, with a “duration” property which allows you to get a position on the path by X time over its duration. This could allow you to run a water visual, or perhaps a mesh position, over the spline from start to end during tick.
If you need it for visuals only:
Possibly you can get away with a material (shader) which blends the color of the pipe from grey to blue over X. X being a mask of the pipe shape and a mask representing the current time of water flow.
You could also do a combination of the two, when one spline (pipe) reaches the last point on its path you either hit a wall or move on to the next spline (pipe 2) its start point and start the fluid material there.
Because of the features you need it’s not a quick implementation, so quite possibly you can find something on the marketplace or use a fluid sim if you don’t have the time to figure it out.
Thank you very much! I just need it for visuals so what you described is probably perfect for my application! Your links seem very helpful as a starting point, these give me some good keywords to solve this. Thanks 
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