Rivers & Lakes

[cory.sharplin]

Anyone know a way to create rivers?

 

Also, what if I want a lake in the middle of my terrain with sea around the outside looks like I can’t resize the second water mesh size from the editor?

 

Any advice on this? cheers

[steve3d]

Use watermesh

[cory.sharplin]

Still no luck, I can create nice looking oceans and a lake in the middle of my terrain from the same water mesh.

 

What we are looking for is the ability to create and resize a second water mesh for a different coloured volcanic lake at another altitude on the terrain, and I cannot figure how to resize the water mesh from the editor.

 

Given that I am not even going to go into explaining the requirement for creating rivers running down the side of a mountain.

 

Any help would be appreciated or is this a current engine limitation?

[manguste]

There are 2 types of water objects in Unigine:

1. Water for infinite ocean (auto-tessellated, created by the engine itself)
   
2. WaterMesh for custom artist-made meshes (for lakes, rivers etc).
   

Here are some tips how to create a river:

 

• If you want to use dynamic reflections (see the attachment):
  
  • Create a flat mesh in your 3D editor. It can be twisting horizontally, but it still should be at 0 for the Z-axis.
    
  • To simulate a river flow, make sure its UV shell is rectangular.
    
  • You can export several water surfaces as one mesh, but they all have to be on the same level (again, it is better to be at zero).
    

  [*] You can still create a mesh of any shape - with different heights, but in this case, you are limited to static reflections only (dynamical ones will look buggy).

   

  [*] In the Unigine editor create WaterMesh. Incline, position or rotate it as you like. You can also freely scale it (but only if your water will not be physically simulated using water body; otherwise, scaling should be avoided).

  [*] Set texture transformations (Transform group in Parameters) to create an effect of flowing water.

That is it :)

[ulf.schroeter]

Create a flat mesh in your 3D editor. It can be twisting horizontally, but it still should be at 0 for the Z-axis.

 

Hi manguste, very helpful explanation which might be good as next documentation tutorial.

 

Just one question: is there a way to to get rid of Z=0 limitation for water meshes ? For real-world scenes this will be almost ever no option (e.g. see this post).

[cory.sharplin]

Thank you for this help.

[manguste]

is there a way to to get rid of Z=0 limitation for water meshes ? For real-world scenes this will be almost ever no option.

Alas, by export it should have Z=0. But after that, in the world you can position the mesh however you need.

[alexei.garbuzenko]

Can someone post screenshots of working rivers in Unigine and their material/mesh properties? I've tried a lot but all my rivers look way too ugly an unnatural :(

[alexei.garbuzenko]

Well, as a result I decided to use procedural water instead of water mesh - it is faster, animates much better and have acceptable look:

[ulf.schroeter]

Looks nice ! What do you exactly mean with procedural water ? Some transparent material with animated normal map ?

[alexei.garbuzenko]

I meant it is just a regular ObjectWater. It performs much better than any kind of water mesh, but it is limited to single water level..

May be there is a way to set some kind of borders for ObjectWater and use several water objects for each level?

[ulf.schroeter]

May be there is a way to set some kind of borders for ObjectWater and use several water objects for each level?

 

ObjectWater uses screenspace projected grid for infinity sized water surface. Therefore multiple ObjectWater instances in the same scene would be problematic.

[pascal.winistoerfer]

I will look what i can show in the next days/weeks as we need realistic water flow, means, with height difference, and not flat flowing water like in the screenshot above.

[manguste]

You can create a water flow with height difference if you use static reflections.