30.10.2023 – Water and Foliage system

Week 5 – Water and Foliage system in Unreal

Water System

You can create realistic water in your project with the Water plugin. Whether you’re designing oceans, lakes, rivers, or customized water bodies, you’ll find the ‘Landscape Water Brush Manager’ and ‘WaterZone’ at your outliner.

• Landscape Water Brush Manager: it captures crucial information about your world and passes it on to the WaterZone. It utilizes this data to generate textures and, ultimately, the mesh of the WaterZone. Information such as base color, normal, and ambient occlusion is part of its composition.
• WaterZone: it controls the quality of the surface mesh that makes up the tiles of the individual water bodies placed in the Level.

You have the flexibility to add Water Body actors and adjust their shapes to your liking. Adding points is a breeze – just press ‘Alt’ and drag a point, and it seamlessly becomes part of the spline. Select a spline, right-click, and you’ll find the ‘Visualize water velocity’ option. This lets you inspect the direction and speed of the water through visualized arrows, and you can even make adjustments by directly dragging these arrows.

The waves of your water are customizable through the Wave options. A double click on ‘Water Waves Asset’ allows you to fine-tune the details.

To explore underwater environments, activate the settings in the ‘Details’ tab under ‘Rendering – Advanced – Underwater Post Process Settings.’

Water colour could be changed by adjusting Instance of Water Material. Also you can turn on ‘Caustics’ which make your water looks more realistic.

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Foliage System

Foliage system, found within Foliage Mode, empowers you to paint foliage directly onto a Landscape or other Actors. It dynamically scatters static meshes and automatically converts them into Instances. Feel free to leverage assets from Quixel Bridge to enrich your landscapes.

When it comes to maintaining performance, consider these tips:

• Keep the number of assets in check for smoother performance.
• Avoid overly complex materials.
• Opt for low-poly meshes.
• Use smaller-sized textures.
• To assess performance, you can enable ‘Stats’ to keep an eye on your project’s efficiency.

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As my project is expected to involve the organization of underwater environments, these systems play a vital role in shaping the future of my work. When I reached out to Emily for insights, she mentioned that the use of Blueprints could significantly enhance the sophistication of these systems. It’s clear that further exploration and study in this area, especially after delving deeper into Blueprints, will be on the horizon.