Water VFX brief: Week 1 Thursday

After Wednesday's blunder, I realised that any more time spent on the water shader itself could waste time, so I set to work on the next thing on my list: particle effects.

I wanted to make the water more dynamic before anything else, so I decided to work on a ripple effect for floating items which could also be recycled for the stream of water later down the line.

I ended up trying out multiple guides to create the ripple effect, testing out each one and then using the one that I liked the best- both in aesthetics and usefulness later down the line. I also tried to exclusively use textures generated from the nodes themselves in order to increase my knowledge of the software.

Attempt 1:
https://answers.unrealengine.com/storage/temp/75343-water_mat.png

I gave up on this effect as it wasn't central, nor was it faded, but I kept it in case I wanted to fade and tweak it myself later and use it for a waterfall ripple effect.

Attempt 2:

https://forums.unrealengine.com/community/community-content-tools-and-tutorials/12434-ripple-soundwave-material-no-textures-needed

I scrapped this attempt as the nodes were incredibly difficult to read and the end result looked nothing like the example image, making it difficult to figure out where I went wrong, as I had no correct example to refer to and learn from.

Attempt 3:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=605G6cipxa8

I scrapped attempt 3 after plugging it into the texture preview and seeing nothing, as I was then made unsure if it would work considering the guide was for a post processing effect rather than a particle effect.

Attempt 4:

This was where I ended up using what I had learnt from the previous attempts to combine them together into a useable texture that generated from the center, while still being usable for a particle effect.

This was much closer to what I wanted, but the refraction on the outside wasn't being masked properly and I realised that the frequency of ripples was a little distracting, so I decided to try again one more time.

Attempt 5:

This time I decided to use another guide, but used my previous knowledge to tweak it and generate the texture myself.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zz_9ySkEUGY

This material didn't have any panning textures, but it wasn't needed as I could animate it within the particle effect settings myself. I decided that I wanted to add some distortion to the ripples, but to focus on the blueprints in the meantime.