Oh, yeah, that is defo comming along. Not very natural, but it might be cool to see human made aquaducts or bridges popping up based on where the river is.
Added “steps” to the river so that it does NOT flow downward constantly but is flat most of the time and then has a little mini-cascade
Added detection of those slopes and they are masked via vertex color so that i can later use a different (foamy) texture there
converted the whole thing into an houdini digital asset so that it cooks in unreal and i dont have to manually export any geometry
since the asset is cooked in unreal, i can change the spline which defines the river directly in unreal and i dont have to do this tweaking in houdini <3
The only problems is, that the cooking takes some seconds so the tweaking of the spline is not “realtimey”.
Yes I saw that realtime-GIF too…no idea how the guy did that Anyway: In Houdini you can create a flow-map which lets the water flow around obstacles. I have to check if this can be re-baked automatically every time I change something in Unreal. I did a quick test and the flow-map didn’t work too well but I’ll investigate more later.
Finally I got procedural placed particle systems running! I detect “top of cascade”, “bottom of cascade” and “obstacle collision with river” and place different particle systems.
There where MANY problems to get this running and I collected the knowledge here:
Nice effect so far, I guess it’s the better river system game ready I’ve seen for a while !
Just a question : do you want to keep the square particle next to the rocks ? It’s get a pretty good feeling, as indie game, and the polygon on the rocks too. Just wondering if you wanted to go on a realistic way or not, as you already did once for a contest (guess it was the fire, don’t remember )
Keep going, I want to see where you are going with this one
Thanks!
The little squares a meant to be place holders I didn’t have the time to do proper particle textures yet but I tested the Houdini System because those guys are procedurally placed. I hope I have enough time but those are next on my to do list. I’m afraid I can’t make it perfect but it was a nice technical exercise!
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