Water Shader

To add some dynamic elements to my scene I worked on creating a simple water shader for the fountain. I used the following tutorial for the base shader then tweaked values and settings to my won design.

Pub Games. (2014). UE4 - Interior Water #1. Available: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KPmRV1Z9ikY. Last accessed 27/11/2014.

One of the first issues I faced was making sure that the water was moving in the right direction. Using the values from the tutorial made my water move incorrectly and stretched it. To counteract this I simply has to change the RGB values on the panner to correspond to the correct axis.

Incorrect panning

The next issue was making the water the colour I wanted it to be. The tutorial gives a completely see through, almost black water colour and I wanted a much nicer clear blue colour. To change this I added an albedo map in the base colour section instead of using an RGB value. By doing this I got a more natural colour but I also had to make sure that the texture map was using a panner as well so it blended into the motion of the water.

When playing around with the panners I realised that the water was moving too fast for the wind speed in the environment so I lowered the panner constant values to decrease this. I also noticed that the water was too transparent so I played with the depth fade value so that the water was not disappearing too soon for the player to even see it.

Final Shader:

UPDATE: I used rotators instead of panners for the final water shader as it gave a more realistic feel to the water movement.