Unreal Engine Buoyancy - Making a Boat Float in UE 5.3

How to use Unreal Engine's Buoyancy Component to make a floating boat actor.
Here is the link to the UE5 documentation ( boat mesh )
docs.unrealengine.com/5.2/en-...
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Physical Material Profiles - Footsteps and Impacts
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[@pyotrvasechkin4620]

Thank you very much for the video, can you make a tutorial on how to create a steerable boat?

[@borisaceski6401]

Lovely video mate! Would love too see a masking solutionfor the water inside the boat.

[@John_atCTS]

Thanks. Yes, would definitely like to see how to mask out the water from the boat.

[@peanut_games]

uploading in like an hour

[@astralstormgamestudios1259]

Thank you!

[@yotube....]

yes please, one to take out the water off the object

[@smokeNghost86]

great content, exactly what i needed. im curious though how you might make the boat sink in game? I'm making a pirate ship game and I want my ships to take on water when they get shot. i figured i can simulate that by doing what you're doing and somehow link the buoyancy to the ships health, the lower the health and add a water effect for cannon balls that show below the water line. but im curious to know how you would approach it because im trying to find things on youtube about sinking ships but i just find them on floating.

[@peanut_games]

Thanks! That sounds like a good start to me. Once the boat 'dies' set the buoyancy just low enough that it slowly sinks then for optimization disable physics once it reaches a certain depth/destroy it. Take a look at the next video too if you haven't. With that method you can toggle the visibility of the water mask mesh to dynamically show/hide the water inside the boat.

[@user-ty3jd7po3n]

I love your boat series so far and i hope there is more content coming from you. You have a great way of explaining things. I Love how you give insight to the UE5 Documentations too and it feels like you're doing things like they are supossed to. I've noticed that my Boat Mesh from a Free UE marketplace asset is not behaving like the BP_Buoyancy_Example Cube. The Cube falls down immediatly when pressing Play, but the Free Boat Mesh that i use just stays where I placed it without falling down. I get the Error Message "trying to Simulate Physics on "BP_Boat_C_1.StaticMesh" But it has ComplexAsSimple Colission". I guess the problem is with the Free UE5 Boat Mesh that i use. maybe somewhere in the settings? Any Idea? Thanks alot!

[@peanut_games]

I appreciate the kind words! To be honest I don't have a concrete follow-up video decided as this seems to be completed, maybe swimming or a look at what I've been working on personally. Let me know what else you'd like to see! As for that message you're getting, yes it's a setting in the mesh itself and it's called "Collision Complexity", for simulation it must use simple collision. Setting it to project default should work.

[@user-ty3jd7po3n]

@@peanut_games Changing the Mesh Settings into Project Default worked like a charm. Thank you very much. As for another content idea I'd suggest Combat Mechanics, like Shooting out of the Boat etc. or Getting water effects caused by the boats movement, so it appears more natural when you're driving the boat and it causes a "footprint" stain. Excuse my english :D. Introducing a interactable Wheel you can drive the boat with would also be cool. I really appreciate your commitment. This type of content is really highly in demand and I hope you can make it big!

[@user-ty3jd7po3n]

@@peanut_games Just had an Idea: If a boat DOES flip over and is upside down in the water, make it either IMPOSSIBLE for the boat to flip over, OR if its upside down in the water or sth, make it automatically go back upright again so the Boat is always in a good position on Water. Sometimes by slightly touching the boat too much it can flip over too hard. Also, i highly recommend setting up a Discord Server for this KZbin Channel.

[@peanut_games]

@@user-ty3jd7po3n Yeah I could make like a polishing the boat video, with a bunch of little things to make it more game ready. I've gotten a couple discord mentions before so I have been thinking about it

[@technicalhariom1291]

Bro thanks for this but is it possible to add this on custom material shader (a plane with a simple water material)

[@peanut_games]

Ah you could use water body custom which uses a plane, but you gotta do a workaround to get buoyancy to work. To get buoyancy to work with water body custom, the water mesh has to be a solid cube, with the pivot point at the surface. This is what I was mentioning at the end of the first water video

[@dangerousmindgames]

My boat with everything set up identically sinks like a stone. Any idea why it works for the example cube but not anything else?

[@peanut_games]

It's possible the mass is auto calculated way too high for the strength of buoyancy.

[@UnTouchedByTime77]

i had the same issue. i fixed it by attaching the static mesh to the default scene root in the BP actor page. i missed that when watching the video

[@cewok9068]

I don't have the option WaterBodyCollision in the collision presets for some reason

[@cewok9068]

NVM, I just had to add the entry to the DefaultEngine.ini. The engine tells you that when you open it

[@peanut_games]

Make sure all the water plugins are activated and restart the editor

[@muralist1]

Didn't know the WaterBodyCustom was "kind of broken," thought it was something I did. What are the issues with it and how can we overcome them? Is there a better way to get a large ocean? I have a large terrain model with islands and have the WaterBodyCustom set up as my ocean, but I've had some trouble.

[@peanut_games]

Yeah I'd definitely reserve water body custom for only pools, puddles, etc. Large ocean is what water body ocean is for! The collision on the water body custom plane is completely broken, which means so is buoyancy. You have to manually change the water mesh to a cube with the pivot *at the surface* for it to work, and even then the post process didn't seem to work at all. So yeah just use ocean, lake, and river with overwhelming preference. If you want no islands just uncheck affects landscape and set all the land spline points at 0 in the SplineComp in the WaterBodyOcean details.

[@muralist1]

@@peanut_games Okay, I'll change over to Ocean. I think originally I tried that but it deformed my real world terrain, as in wrecked it. I don't want any islands nor landscape deformation, just water to fill my terrain which already has islands. If I set all the land spline points to 0 in the SplineComp will it do that?

[@peanut_games]

@@muralist1 The "Affects Landscape" flag prevents it from changing landscape, but that leaves a hole in the center where the default island would be - so setting the spline points to exactly 0 fills that hole thus making it clean near infinite ocean.

[@muralist1]

@@peanut_games Did both of those and now its just ocean and my terrain. Thanks!

[@peanut_games]

@@muralist1 awesome no problem

[@betraid]

I have waterbodycollision as collision preset on my water body ocean, but this buoyancy cube is not reacting to it, it just falls through

[@peanut_games]

Is the cube above the water before starting? It can't be overlapping at all

[@betraid]

@@peanut_games yes it is above the water, dunno why it isn't working😅 when i did it on my boat, it worked, but doing strange movements, looks like it needs ton of tweaks and time. I just was looking for way to animate boats for my open world level, nothing fancy, just floating simulation on same place.

[@peanut_games]

@@betraid linear and angular dampening are probably the most relevant as they set resistance to movement, so if it's acting crazy I'd star there. The locations of pontoons is important too, spread them out more to stabilize. Doesn't make sense why the demo cube isn't floating though, it should work as they provide it as long as the water has the right collision profile. Maybe this is stupid but make sure the WaterBodyCollision profile is actually set to overlap the desired objects, and that your objects have Generate Overlap Events ticked.

[@betraid]

@@peanut_games it could be some bug maybe, since i have pretty large water body ocean, covering large island 15k actors in total:D

[@unrealversum7729]

yes please, no water in boat