2D Art Nice looking water on a mesh?

[shadowwill]

Ive made a waterfall from static meshes. Right now all it has is a panning water texture and looks pretty boring and unrealistic. What id like is some nice shiney effect, or some things that will make it look more fluid like. However ive no idea how to do this stuff in the editor. I find the texture making stuff really confusing when it comes to shaders and things. Im guessing cubemaps and specular maps will make the texture look better but i dont know how to put them to use.

Would someone be kind enough to give me a basic understanding to how i can make my water look more fluid like? Thank you.

 

[Murphy]

Place an xProcMesh and use your StaticMesh as its StaticMesh. This will make your StaticMesh animate a bit as if it was a FluidSurface. It has a few fairly self-explanatory settings you can tweak as well. This only works if your StaticMesh has a bunch of polys as the animation can only move vertices back and forth, so if it's all flat it won't do anything.
For shininess read this:
http://udn.epicgames.com/Two/MaterialsEnvironmentMaps.html
The resulting shiny texture can be combined with a watertexture so it doesn't look like liquid chrome but like water. If you need help with this, come back here.

Good luck!

 

[shadowwill]

Sweet thanks murph. So for the static mesh i have as a waterfall, i need to add more polys that will make it more more? like make the mesh look like the terrain mesh looks like?

 

[shadowwill]

AGH ! unreal ED is so annoying ! ive managed to make the cubemap so it makes it look a bit shiney. But when i try other things like putting a specular mask on it always crashes and when i load it back up, all the textures i imported and made are gone even if ive saved it.

 

[Murphy]

Don't save the myLevel package! Ever. If you have them in myLevel you need to use them somewhere in the level or they are gone once you close UnrealEd. This is so you can open other maps' myLevel packages by opening them first without saving all the content into your map which isn't really needed.
If you have the texture in a package other than myLevel they should be saved when you save the package from the texture browser no matter what.

When I said more polys I did not mean it should look like a terrain. That's probably overkill because you also have the texture and you only need a bit of subtle wave movement. Just have some vertices there that can be animated so it isn't completely flat.

What did you do to make it crash?
(a common mistake is to select a shader to open its properties and then "use" a texture as one of the Shader's components but as you still have the Shader selected and not the texture you use the Shader in itself. This crashes UEd. If it was something else, please post what it was.)

 

[shadowwill]

Yeah thats what i did to make it crash.

And bugger, i saved the mylevel package ! what does this mean now?

And the waterfall i have now, it has a nice wavy look to it, with just a simple cubemap to it to make it look shiney. Its ok but still not perfect. I tried making a specular map, but it just didnt work as i expected it to. It was a black and white image, and when i used it as specular the black disappeared and only the white was left, but it didnt create the specular effect i expected, it was like a texture had just been out on top of the base texture.

 

[Murphy]

Just delete the myLevel package from your Textures folder.

Use a waterfall texture (maybe a TexPanner), then create a texture that is randomly transparent. Maybe use a cloud generator in a graphics program.
Then create a Shader and use the waterfall panner as Diffuse, the randomly transparent texture as SpecularityMask and the TexEnvMap that makes it shiny as Specular.
If you need the whole thing to be see through use a see-through texture as Opacity. This will use the opacity of that texture as the opacity of your Shader.
You'll have to experiment with the randomly transparent texture a bit to get the look down.

If this turns out to be buggy in-game, use a Combiner instead of the Shader. Create a Combiner, use the waterfall panner as Material 1, the TexEnvMap as Material 2 and the randomly transparent texture as Mask. Then use Alphablend with Mask.
If you want it to be see-through create a Shader and use the Combiner as Diffuse and a see-through texture as Opacity.

 

[shadowwill]

Alright thanks murphy ill give that a try now, cheers buddy.