FMP: Week 18 Monday

On Monday, I made the ripple and mist particle effects for the water! I also added a post processing effect for under the water and changed the colour/opacity for the water planes visible inside of the water, as the depthfade was causing some issues when looking out of the water box rather than into it.

For the ripple wake material, I created a wobbly ring in photoshop and then on another channel I airbrushed sections of that ring, so that the ValueStep would gradient into those sections, splitting the ring into separate chunks. I improvised this following this tutorial. I would have preferred if I could have gotten the ripple to look more natural like seen here, but I wasn't sure how to do it since their breakdown is mostly in C++. I used the DebugTimeSine to check the progression of erosion before plugging it into the particle effect.

For the mist, I did the same but from a cropped section of my alpha texture.

I spread the mist along a line where the waterfall edge would be and changed the rotation to random, with alpha over life fading in and out.

For the ripple, I locked the axis to Z so it would lay flat against the water and I set the rotation to random, as well as adding size by life and alpha over life.

For the water blueprint, I had 3 different levels of water and had to create 3 collisions for them, but they had the same effect, so I added them all to the same timer by event, but with different height floats fed into the Z location of the particle emitters. On play, two timers would be set: one for static ripples and one for moving ripples. These would then be paused and only unpaused depending on whether or not the character was moving in the collision area (or standing still). Originally, I wanted to create a particle parameter to set the lifetime of the emitter depending on the speed of the player, but for some reason when I tried to implement it it would only work half of the time (some slow ripples were created alongside some fast ones, when all should have been fast).

The result!

Underwater Postprocessing and two sided textures

Twosided texturing added to the top water plane so that it wouldn't be super dark when looking up (as the depthfade would be calculating the sky instead of water volume otherwise)