I chose to try a river of lava.
I decided to practice landscaping with the sculpting tool and the landscape spline tool. I followed Axton99s tutorial to learn how splines work.
I followed Michael Arendt’s tutorial on creating a river material with Starter Content assets.
Landscape splines use a static mesh so I created a 2D plane and attached my river material to it.
The first issue I ran into was the landscape deformation would not properly set on my terrain. I think it may be related to how I assigned separate materials for the volcano area with a Landscape Gizmo Active Actor, instead of using the paint tool (and a separate material editor for target layouts.)
The second issue I noticed is my water shader is flowing in the WRONG direction! I’ll have to try adjusting the direction of the splines and see if I can get a different result.
To add specific particle effects, I’m going to add 3 things:
- A explosion of lava and rock from the top
- Bubbles on the surface of the river in select spaces
- Periodic geyser eruptions, maybe at the base.
If there’s anything else you’d like me to add or try out, let me know!