Hello everyone, I’m gonna start documenting a game that a friend and I are gonna be working on. It’s really just for personal experience and portfolio work, but I will be spending A LOT of time working on this.
The title of out game is called Rune Hook. It will be a cross between fishing and magic. The development will be all over the place, but I am going to tackle all of the realtime fx and a lot of the tech art.
So far, I have established a water system, that I am gonna try to further optimize. It seems that everyone starting to tackle really nice water follows DeathReys amazing FFT setup. I was able to get it up and running in 5.4, there was a lot of weird bugs along the way but I got past them.
As of right now, I am working on the buoyancy system, which is gonna be a bit challenging because I am gonna try to stick in blueprints (not really well versed in C++, only python as of right now). On that note, I am getting somewhere, I at least have a boat floating in some sort of way lol. And I also am working on a texture driven whirpool, using houdini to make some nice WPO textures.
Once I kind of get all the big technical foundation layed out, I am gonna hop around more, but for now staying focused on these large water elements.
Time for another update. I have been diving even deeper into whirlpools and water, exploring what is possible (more importantly what i am capable of).
I completely restructured my water, the fft waves were super unoptimized and very confusing. I decided to go for the gerstner waves and they look good while performing optimally. Finally got the buoyancy stuff figured out as well.
Been really thinking about my whirpool setup and its limitations. I have been using a looped flipbook and some other big material setups to create the whirlpool, but the problem with flipbooks driving actual WPO and not just detail is that buoancy/position data will not be readable by say a niagara system. So, i have been working on a function using hlsl that will be able to compute without reading shading data (similar to how gerstner wave calculations are done in the hlsl script). I am pretty close, and have a great whirlpool shape, but part of it is still relying on a texture in a way that won’t work in niagara. If i am using the whirlpool flipbook though, I found a neat way to make foam that looks pretty good for a first try. From some research foam mask is usally made through a height calculation, maybe a height lerp even. But I was able to just saturate and use the power nodes to leave me with only the peak points of the whirlpool offset. And threw in some foam texture online to affect the normals and mask further.
Besides that, I am gonna keep truckin along and get into some more niagara based stuff soon!
Made a youtube video discussing some of the things that I have been learning about as I make whirlpools in unreal. Maybe you will find some help in the video, or if you have any advice or comments I am all ears.
