Travis McCallum: Sketch #17 WIP

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:

  1. A explosion of lava and rock from the top
  2. Bubbles on the surface of the river in select spaces
  3. Periodic geyser eruptions, maybe at the base.

If there’s anything else you’d like me to add or try out, let me know!

2 Likes

great idea to make a lava river! looking forward where this is going!