Water Meshing System and Surface Rendering
An overview of how water surfaces and meshes are rendered in Unreal Engine.
Choose your operating system:
Windows
macOS
Linux
The Water system enables you to create rivers, lakes, and oceans that all interact and work together with your Landscape terrains using a spline-based workflow. The Water system unifies the shading and mesh rendering pipeline, with surfaces that support physics interactions and fluid simulation with gameplay, such as ripples caused by footsteps or the wake behind a boat moving through the water.
Enabling the Water System Plugin and Content
The Water system is a self-contained plugin that can be enabled/disabled depending on whether you need it for your project. The plugin enables the rendering and meshing system for water, and also provides example and default content for you to use.
To enable the Water system, use Edit > Plugins to open the Plugins browser. Search for the Water plugin and check its box to enable it.
Restart the editor for changes to take effect.
Additional Water Plugin Content
The Water plugin also contains some default materials and content that can be used in your own projects or for exploration. You can find it in the Content Browser under the Water Content folder.
If you do not see this folder in your Content Browser, select View Options (located in the bottom-right) and check the boxes next to Show Engine Content and Show Plugin Content .
In this folder, there are example maps and content to try on your own, such as:
-
Caustics generation
-
Fluid simulation
-
Physics simulation buoyancy Blueprints