River Water with 4.26 Water System - Building Worlds In Unreal - Episode 24

In this video, we add a procedural river to our landscape scene using the new water system added in Unreal Engine 4.26. Before we add the water, I show how to get our landscape set up - including reducing the size of the landscape, raising the landscape above 0 in height, and turning on Edit Layers - all requirements for the water system. Then I add a River system and show the controls available for tuning the behaviour of the river. #UnrealEngine #UE4 #Water
Here's the previous episode on blending objects with the landscape:
• Landscape Material Ble...
And here's the playlist for the whole series:
• Building Worlds in Unr...
Learn more!
• Unreal Engine 4: Ultim...
• Landscape Virtual Text...
• Unreal Engine Runtime ...
• Easy Runtime Virtual T...
• Landscape color blendi...
Shader Book Recommendations
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[@懷恩-o1e]

REALLY GOOD TUTORIAL!!!! your series is a bible for everyone who wish to become an environment artist!!!

[@xantishayde-walker4593]

Just wanted to say, right off the bat, thank you for getting your audio levels matched better. No more blowing out my eardrums then straining to hear you because you're so quiet compared to your intro music. Also, I'm sure this video is great, just like all the others. Keep on being awesome, Ben! Edit: This video was pretty great.

[@default5915]

Starting from 5.0 (if i'm not mistaken) there is now an "affect landscape" option inside the water actor details terrain section which will allow to NOT deform you landscape and just setup the water splines as you wish. Thanks for the all your videos Ben!

[@VoilKing]

While the water system does have issues, I see great promises and wonderful maps being created! Thank you for this awesome tutorial video :)

[@ethanwasme4307]

I'm staying in 4.27 because I can't even adjust the river's settings while having affect landscape toggled on! xD Great tip you showed us, incrementally adjusting the spline width over distance :D Going off another tip of yours... I just placed the start/end points and then duplicated the middle spline point

[@666nevermore]

Your episodes are the thing I’m waiting the most

[@Cephalopopo]

thank you for covering this feature. Really well explained.

[@witchreturns2263]

Thanks a lot. This is what I needed for my map

[@kubasitko7042]

Thank you your awesome, I couldn't find anywhere where my issue was, I simply had to increase the height of my landscape. You're awesome, leaving a strong like :)

[@MR3DDev]

Nice see you tackling this water system.

[@BenCloward]

Thanks! It was a tricky one and took me a bit to wrangle it. And as you can see from the results I have so far, it's still not very pretty. Hoping to improve that for next week, but we'll see. I linked your videos in the description. They were really helpful.

[@MR3DDev]

@@BenCloward Thanks a lot, that is really appreciated. The Unreal water system is great but at its current point still requires a ton of tweaking to make it look good.

[@TheJackalxy]

One thing that I would love to see as developement goes on is something like Blender's Grease Pencil with the possibility of drawing the spline on the landscape surface, without having to move the spline points on the z axis just to make them on the same relative plane I forgot to add, there is also UIWS in the marketplace for free that seems to replicate some of the simpler feature of the landscape plugin, maybe it could be interesting to see how it compares in quality and performance

[@BenCloward]

The option to stick the spline to the general height of the landscape would be really useful. It was kind of a chore to keep adjusting it to the right height.

[@emilasplund4462]

Your tutorials are amazing! Thank you! 🙏

[@chrispetersen3613]

Thank youuuu! You’re the best Ben!

[@simonjulian6499]

Danke!

[@tranceemerson8325]

also another thing is that when the slope gets steeper, the water picks up speed and creates splashes, and collides with rocks and channels between them.

[@SomeKindOfMattias]

The curl noise feature is amazing for landmass brushes and would be very useful for adding irregularlity to a river. I think they’ve might not have adapter that feature yet for rivers (unless I’m missing something) since you get rather ugly holes on the side of the river. I’m guessing this is because it’ll add curl noise vertically resulting in it subtracting to much in the blend. Shouldn’t be super hard to fix however. Super interesting tutorial as always!

[@BenCloward]

I'm going to try to experiment with this a little bit to see if I can use it to break up the perfect straightness of the river. If I can find something that works, I'll talk about it in next week's video. If it's as you say and just causes artifacts, I guess we'll have to wait until they fix it.

[@SomeKindOfMattias]

@@BenCloward if you just remove the z part of the noise it should work. I mean would be nice with some ridge noise but that’d be an easy fix... perhaps. Looking forward to it! Also would be super interesting with an episode covering dynamic opacity masking of water :)

[@bulletmunchr]

Excellent tutorials. Ben are you thinking about doing case study materials where you look at popular games and try to recreate materials and explain the thought process? An example would be recreating like Left for Dead highlight through walls but not line of sight shader

[@ProgZ]

Don't forget to enable "Enable Edit Layer" when creating the landscape or it won't work properly :)

[@BadassBiscuit-w5o]

Reaaaally Cool ~ Great Tutorial！ 🆒

[@mazfrans9568]

Make Spline Road tutorial :)

[@BenCloward]

That's a good idea. Thank you for the suggestion!

[@Bunny-hj5sf]

The water at 4.26 is generally good, but there are still many problems ,I usually use Houdini to make these

[@vaibhav582]

Can someone please help me? I did everything shown in the video correctly but when I drag "Water Body River" or any other, it alters the landscape with the spline but no water gets rendered, I can see the underwater material when I go inside the river with my camera but from top no water material is there, just the landmass thing is working correctly to auto shape the landscape, please tell me how to fix this issue.

[@mehrdadhajizadeh2979]

when i search for water plugin i connot find it . what should i do . if anyone can help ill be glad. and thank you for such a great and helpful content

[@qwert-ly7uc]

谢谢分享，非常精彩

[@BenCloward]

别客气

[@nfrancisj2122]

Ahhh... you missed a chance to deliver a pun! Instead of JUMP right in, use DIVE right in. 😂🍕

[@BenCloward]

Hah - good one!

[@josephvanwyk2088]

I have difficulty understanding the edge deformation around streams, oceans - how it makes a mess of your landscape. And when tweaking the paramaters, it's like switch (on for crappy) and (off for less crappy).

[@MasterMind-px5nv]

Can you put your projet in the description so we can check if we make an error or if we want to experiment, add somethings or just to check if everythings we did is good. It will be very nice, great job!

[@BrianScotland]

Ooh. Piece of candy.Ooh. Piec...

[@nierautomata9654]

I noticed the water system does not have a waterfall…can we use the river system instead and just rotate it so it flows vertically visually??

[@felixmikolai7375]

Ty good job - you can change the Color of the Water !

[@felixmikolai7375]

Wow such a system would be awesome! If u planned your area b4 you can brush the right bed material b4 placing the river or not?

[@BenCloward]

Yes, if you wanted to paint the river bed manually, you could do that either before or after placing the river spline. However, the draw back is that if you need to move the river, you would have to repaint the materials on the landscape. In episode 25 - coming Thursday - I'm going to show how to make the river automatically lay down a river bed material on the landscape.

[@felixmikolai7375]

@@BenCloward thank you very much sir, good work here on youtube! u explain it even better then unreal itself x)

[@jeandusse5192]

no ryally good

[@emmanuelmatewere7575]

HI bro, how can you change the river flow direction?

[@Restart-Gaming]

I might have ask before not very sure but with all this is there a way to use rvt on a open world tile map in world comp?

[@jackisonfire]

Hey Ben, quick question. I'm noticing on the 8K x 8K landscape you created the auto material is causing some odd results with the grass its producing. It seems the layers are never fully represented by one specific layer for example the areas of the map that are low and flat you should be getting grass and then the landscape grass output should be generating grass there. Since the layers are never truly separate your getting some odd patching of grass. I’m using a different grass that I created but following along with the things you’re doing. I end up getting wildly different amounts around my character with better FPS on the fuller amount imgur.com/dVOQtDk than the more sparse imgur.com/cFPzkaI (the sparse is using auto material the fuller is using a painted landscape with individual layers). The auto I’m receiving around 90fps and the other I’m getting ~102.fps. Again im not sure if this is just unavoidable when using auto landscape material just thought I would bring it up.

[@BenCloward]

Yes, the blending settings that I'm currently using for angle blending between the grass and dirt make the blend pretty patchy. It doesn't resolve to solid grass in very many places - only in areas where it's very flat, and on my landscape, there aren't very many very flat areas. This is somewhat by design, but it does cause the side-effect that you're describing where the grass is pretty patchy. If you want more uniform grass application, you can adjust the angle blend settings to use less of the pixel normal, and to be applied slightly more up the slope and not just on flats. That will create more of a separation between the grass and the dirt materials. One of my current problems is that I don't like the grass material I'm using very much and so my current settings are designed to break it up with dirt. I should probably just find a better grass material instead.

[@jackisonfire]

@@BenCloward Totally makes sense thank you!

[@muerezombie4610]

que buen canal!!

[@BenCloward]

Gracias!

[@historie-hradu-zamku-tvrzi]

Nice tutorial :) but I have question when I untick Affect Landscape my water disapears why is this happening? Is there fix for it or am I doing something wrong?

[@deepakgiri.j1973]

My landscape material normal looks like inverted by using cr noh method in some place plz help me sir

[@BenCloward]

If you open and look at each of your NOH textures, the green channel should look like it's lit from the bottom. If it looks like it's lit from the top instead, you can invert it by checking the "Flip Green Channel" box on the texture settings.

[@MrDbzguy]

everyone is making this look insanely easy but every time i try this, every body of water i put down goes UNDER my landscape and i can't move it.

[@santinopalmieri8802]

for some reason i cant even get the water actors to work, I drag them into my scene but no water has ever appeared(yes I am on 4.26), anyone know why?

[@BenCloward]

That was happening to me. One potential reason is that you're trying to add water at a height that's below zero on the Z axis. Try moving your landscape up into the positive height area.

[@santinopalmieri8802]

@@BenCloward i tried that aswell, still not working, its extremely annoying

[@HSR_Freak]

Can you add river foam?

[@BenCloward]

Oh, that's a good idea. I'll give it a try.

[@timowiest4580]

Hi Ben, how would i approach the goal to tesselate a mask? I created along your tutorials a grass layer where i mix in dirt with a mask. Now i want to lower the parts where the dirt is. My goal is to lower the whole dirt spots 3 to 4 cm to get a sloap between the grass and the dirt. Example Image: drive.google.com/drive/folders/1TV5R5_eBQoeCLvBlizJA9KomkUPu-rjt?usp=sharing

[@BenCloward]

Does it work to make the heightmap for the dirt darker? Just edit the texture to make the height map (stored in the alpha channel of the NOH texture in the packing format that I use) darker, and that should lower it.

[@blakegt.7326]

I still don't understand what's the ig deal about this new water.... It looks ugly...

[@AlexandarKaravelov]

Everything is very nice, but ... THE STUPID RIVER has dug up the whole Landscape! If you had put a little more effort into making the Landscape, you wouldn't have touched this experimental tool.