Watched the whole series in no time, going back to episode 1 for another round. A big heartfelt THANK YOU Ben, these are worth a million. The content is on point, and you have great communication and teaching skills. Congrats and long-live the channel!
Binge watched it all the way and everything went perfectly fine. I never had any issues along the way. I enjoyed listening to you and you went at a great speed to keep up. I could even stay on Unreal and follow along well enough just by your directions. You are a natural born teacher who enjoys to teach as well as learn. The thing that makes you stand out the most is you love what you do. And your tutorials reflect that. You are very informative and very good at directions and guidance. Thank you very much for the water shader tutorials. I can't wait to binge the next tutorial set you have!!
it have been a Year that I descovred your channel and I didn't see yet anyone who excels at explaining so deep and clair how to do things in UE4 as you do ! you are a master !
This is the best tutorial I've seen in a while. I was not interested in this particular subject (it's not what I was looking for) but got hooked, watched the whole video and subscribed to your channel. Thank you for making this awesome tutorial!
I've watched the whole series up to this episode. Great work; thanks so much for the effort you put into it. I have successfully made a simple puddle decal using procedural noise. Very satisfying to see it work so well! If you ever feel like doing a follow-up to this series, I would love to see how to apply your techniques to making a large ocean plane. Seems like you have probably covered most of what's needed, but I suspect the scale may introduce additional tiling issues, and getting realistic shore interaction and near-shore waves while keeping performance costs reasonable also feels challenging. An episode addressing being underwater would be interesting, too.
Great content, even for more experienced unreal users! Your water series is super helpful :) I would love to see a video on the new SingleLayerWater shading model, that would be a great addition^^
Thanks a lot for all those tutorials. They are straight to the point as being educative as well. So great job. One topic I haven't seen though which would be great to cover is Material LODs. After completing the whole water series, I end up with a shader being around 600 shader instructions. I also have other materials with multiple layers based on ramps and normals with multiple displace textures ect... so it would be great to see the process you might go through to "convert" heavy materials in LOD's like shader. Thanks again for sharing your knowledge and keep up the awesome work.
That's a great idea for a tutorial topic. Thanks for the suggestion. And yes, water shaders are usually pretty expensive. They're complex, but they also use transparency (or at least this one does) - which automatically makes them more expensive.
I saw in an article by VFXDoc that you can map the frac of time to the [-1, +1] range, instead of just [0, +1] by default. This way the flowmap acts both negatively and positively, extending its range of effect.
This series has been so concise and educational. I feel like I have a good handle on the topics after each video, or at least what questions to ask. I like how you show what each step does, even if it temporarily breaks something. This is especially helpful for troubleshooting and tweaking settings later. Could you do a buoyancy tutorial for this water system? That would be a huge help. And possibly one for creating masks for objects floating in the water (so water doesn't flood the objects)?
I'm pretty sure you already know this, but just in case you don't, there's a free plugin made by the great Ryan Brucks to paint flowmaps directly within UE4, so you don't need any other software or to make screenshots. In case someone is interested, here's the link to Ryan's video: ruclips.net/video/5yoRK3PqHbU/видео.html
Hi Ben! Your water series has been amazing! I would love it if you could expand it more! I would really like to see how you would incorporate an under water post process so it works really well with your caustics decal and how you would add a water line to the camera and an under water looking up perspective as well just to really sell it! With those missing elements I really feel like this would round off every aspect of water materials!
@@BenCloward Personally I would be interested in seeing some methods for rendering the underwater area, or even more, the split between underwater and above water. I've been trying different things but always ended up with some limitations, for example a post process material for underwater fog that doesen't work with the translucent water surface, or a waterline material for translucent objects that's not in sync with the displacement of the waves.
Thank you! Whether or not this should be included probably depends on the process you used to create the flow map. You could get the same result by flipping the red channel of the flow map.
I'd love to see another tutorial where you apply this with world displacement. Is this how wind & fog effects were done in Asher Zhu's "Valley of the Ancient" ??
Yes, that’s true. A sine wave fades in and out smoothly - so if I wanted the drops to fade in and out, I’d use a sine wave. However, in my case I want the drops to hit hard at the start and then fade out slowly. So sure, you can use a sine wave if you want. But it’s not what I’ve chosen to do.
@@BenCloward hey, thanks for the reply, I tried that but it's gets overlapped by the geometrical waves I think, so I attached the ripple function to the gerstner waves, somehow it fixed the problem.
I am following you tuts over the days, its so good and informative. Do you have any agenda what you gonna talk about in the furture? will there will be some tut on landscape material blending, tesellatation, i often encounter some technical issues as a beginner, so i think it would be some great topic on that! BTW, will you consider make a discord community so that we could have some place to talk about UE4!
That's just a cut in the video to remove a spot where I wasn't explaining anything - mostly to shorten the video a little bit and save your time. Sorry if it was confusing. It's pretty simple to do. You just create a multiply node, wire your value to the first port and set the second port to 2. Then you wire that multiply to a subtract node and set the second subtract value to 1.
I replicated your material shader for the flow but somehow dont seem to get it working. Tried cranking up and down the texture coordinates but doesnt seem to work.
thank you so much for your very nice water tutorial series. I am creating a canal with some boats in it, and I am wondering if it is possible to remove or make not visible the water that gets in the boats. Any recommendation? Thank you again!
This is a tricky problem that I haven’t had to deal with for a long time. I remember back in 2005 I worked on a game with this exact issue. We placed a plane in the boats that had a transparent shader on it that was set to draw before the water plane. This forced a sort order “problem” that made the water inside the boats not appear even though it was there. Hopefully that’s enough to get you started.
My man you are HUGE. Btw a big big suggestion: Your voice is nice and calm but you are putting trash royalty free music in your background which are really out of place here, not only I dislike them, but I think the quality and seriousness of your videos are mismatching that music. Your voice alone is 10times stronger than combined with that kind of music. Trust me
If you're referring to the Flowmap Painter software, the link is working fine for me. Here it is again: teckartist.com/?page_id=107 You can also just do a Google search for "flowmap painter" and it's the first result.
Ah I see. Ok, do the following. Using Chrome, right click on the download link and choose "Save link as..." Then select the location on your machine where you want to save it. You'll then see a little note in the lower left of the browser that says "can't be downloaded securely." Click the little up arrow to the right of that message and select "Keep." All of this is happening because the owner of the web site as not yet enabled SSL on his server. It's not big deal - just makes it more annoying.
this flow map painter kinda sux... ithere a better way to do it? Its difficult to push and pull.. every initial click messes up my current flow direciton.. not to mention it crashes on me quite often if i alt tab it enough times
Yes, I agree. It looks like Substance Painter can do it: helpx.adobe.com/substance-3d-painter/painting/advanced-channel-painting/flow-map-painting.html. And it looks like Krita can also do it: docs.krita.org/en/reference_manual/brushes/brush_engines/tangen_normal_brush_engine.html I haven't used either of these so I don't know how well they work.
Hey, Ben. I do have a question. After I completed the full tutorial, i plugged the water ripple function back into the normal slot, to see the finished water with rain ripples. But i didn't see any. Maybe they were too small and were washed away in the waves. But no matter what i did they never appeared. Do you maybe know why?
@@BenCloward Wow you're incredibly helpful AND respond to questions. You really are gold brother lol Without the normals added and using only the ripples, it works fine. However i added the normals back in with the ripples and looked closer at the water and the ripples are there. But there are very very few and they only show up at certain points in the waves. It looks like they only appear at the peak of the waves . As soon as a wave passes, the ripples instantly disappear. I believe the waves may be greatly distorting the ripples and it gives the illusion of them disappearing.
Sounds like you need to find a different method of combining the two normals if you want the rain ripples to show up more prominently after they’re combined.
Watched the whole series in no time, going back to episode 1 for another round. A big heartfelt THANK YOU Ben, these are worth a million. The content is on point, and you have great communication and teaching skills. Congrats and long-live the channel!
agreed
agreed
Binge watched it all the way and everything went perfectly fine. I never had any issues along the way.
I enjoyed listening to you and you went at a great speed to keep up. I could even stay on Unreal and follow along well enough just by your directions.
You are a natural born teacher who enjoys to teach as well as learn.
The thing that makes you stand out the most is you love what you do. And your tutorials reflect that.
You are very informative and very good at directions and guidance.
Thank you very much for the water shader tutorials. I can't wait to binge the next tutorial set you have!!
it have been a Year that I descovred your channel and I didn't see yet anyone who excels at explaining so deep and clair how to do things in UE4 as you do ! you are a master !
This channel is full of under the hood infos .. thank you for your time... !
This is the best tutorial I've seen in a while. I was not interested in this particular subject (it's not what I was looking for) but got hooked, watched the whole video and subscribed to your channel. Thank you for making this awesome tutorial!
Thanks Ben for making this tutorial. Always great to watch your tutorials!
What a gold mine of info!
What an amazing lerping trick
I've watched the whole series up to this episode. Great work; thanks so much for the effort you put into it. I have successfully made a simple puddle decal using procedural noise. Very satisfying to see it work so well! If you ever feel like doing a follow-up to this series, I would love to see how to apply your techniques to making a large ocean plane. Seems like you have probably covered most of what's needed, but I suspect the scale may introduce additional tiling issues, and getting realistic shore interaction and near-shore waves while keeping performance costs reasonable also feels challenging. An episode addressing being underwater would be interesting, too.
These are great suggestions. Thank you!
++
Magnificent! Thank you for the very well delivered information!
They only channel at RUclips where I click 'like' before watching a video.
Ha! Thanks a lot - that's amazing!
you deserve it man, you make the easiest to understand tutorials for materials on youtube!
Me too^^
Great content, even for more experienced unreal users! Your water series is super helpful :) I would love to see a video on the new SingleLayerWater shading model, that would be a great addition^^
Thanks for this Ben
Thanks a lot for all those tutorials. They are straight to the point as being educative as well. So great job.
One topic I haven't seen though which would be great to cover is Material LODs.
After completing the whole water series, I end up with a shader being around 600 shader instructions. I also have other materials with multiple layers based on ramps and normals with multiple displace textures ect... so it would be great to see the process you might go through to "convert" heavy materials in LOD's like shader.
Thanks again for sharing your knowledge and keep up the awesome work.
That's a great idea for a tutorial topic. Thanks for the suggestion. And yes, water shaders are usually pretty expensive. They're complex, but they also use transparency (or at least this one does) - which automatically makes them more expensive.
Totally awesome! This stuff is so cool
Thank you Master
Marvelous! As always! Thanks a lot for the videos.
excellent tutorial sir, extremely clear. thank you
thankyou for this this workflow is easily replicable to other 3d engines have pbr shaderfx type shaders.
I saw in an article by VFXDoc that you can map the frac of time to the [-1, +1] range, instead of just [0, +1] by default. This way the flowmap acts both negatively and positively, extending its range of effect.
this is gold
This series has been so concise and educational. I feel like I have a good handle on the topics after each video, or at least what questions to ask. I like how you show what each step does, even if it temporarily breaks something. This is especially helpful for troubleshooting and tweaking settings later.
Could you do a buoyancy tutorial for this water system? That would be a huge help.
And possibly one for creating masks for objects floating in the water (so water doesn't flood the objects)?
I'm pretty sure you already know this, but just in case you don't, there's a free plugin made by the great Ryan Brucks to paint flowmaps directly within UE4, so you don't need any other software or to make screenshots.
In case someone is interested, here's the link to Ryan's video:
ruclips.net/video/5yoRK3PqHbU/видео.html
I guess said plugin was removed.
Great video. Thank you so much legend
Hi Ben! Your water series has been amazing! I would love it if you could expand it more! I would really like to see how you would incorporate an under water post process so it works really well with your caustics decal and how you would add a water line to the camera and an under water looking up perspective as well just to really sell it! With those missing elements I really feel like this would round off every aspect of water materials!
I love your water series! Will next weeks video continue on it?
I haven't decided yet. Any suggestions?
@@BenCloward Personally I would be interested in seeing some methods for rendering the underwater area, or even more, the split between underwater and above water. I've been trying different things but always ended up with some limitations, for example a post process material for underwater fog that doesen't work with the translucent water surface, or a waterline material for translucent objects that's not in sync with the displacement of the waves.
@@BenCloward PLease make some wonderfull thing with the water coast line too. Pleeeeeeeaze ^^
There is a little problem, the flowmap should multiply (-1,1) first.
Thank you! Whether or not this should be included probably depends on the process you used to create the flow map. You could get the same result by flipping the red channel of the flow map.
@@BenCloward Got that, thanks!
I'd love to see another tutorial where you apply this with world displacement. Is this how wind & fog effects were done in Asher Zhu's "Valley of the Ancient" ??
how can i control water speed?
You could've just used a sine node to perform the blinking alpha input! Great tut btw!
Yes, that’s true. A sine wave fades in and out smoothly - so if I wanted the drops to fade in and out, I’d use a sine wave. However, in my case I want the drops to hit hard at the start and then fade out slowly. So sure, you can use a sine wave if you want. But it’s not what I’ve chosen to do.
Hey, really useful tutorial ben, by the way, is there a way to combine the rain ripples function with the final water shader?
Yes, you can do that. Just add the result of the ripples function with the normals of the water.
@@BenCloward hey, thanks for the reply, I tried that but it's gets overlapped by the geometrical waves I think, so I attached the ripple function to the gerstner waves, somehow it fixed the problem.
Hi, great tutorial! I just want to ask how did you create a function out of the shader logic. Im sorry for this noob question.
I am following you tuts over the days, its so good and informative. Do you have any agenda what you gonna talk about in the furture? will there will be some tut on landscape material blending, tesellatation, i often encounter some technical issues as a beginner, so i think it would be some great topic on that! BTW, will you consider make a discord community so that we could have some place to talk about UE4!
yo this is awesome, this is like how they do it in skyrim hah
Your tutorials are absolutely phenomenol. Is there any chance (if you know how to) how to create clouds that dynamically grow and spawn rain etc
Ok I’m sorry I am new here. But when you did the multiply by 2 and subtract 1. How did you do that? 10:56
That's just a cut in the video to remove a spot where I wasn't explaining anything - mostly to shorten the video a little bit and save your time. Sorry if it was confusing. It's pretty simple to do. You just create a multiply node, wire your value to the first port and set the second port to 2. Then you wire that multiply to a subtract node and set the second subtract value to 1.
@@BenCloward do i do that in the settings under Const A and Const B?
I replicated your material shader for the flow but somehow dont seem to get it working. Tried cranking up and down the texture coordinates but doesnt seem to work.
hello, I have a problem, my shader doesn't loop. Have you an idea of what the problem can be ?
thank you so much for your very nice water tutorial series.
I am creating a canal with some boats in it, and I am wondering if it is possible to remove or make not visible the water that gets in the boats.
Any recommendation?
Thank you again!
This is a tricky problem that I haven’t had to deal with for a long time. I remember back in 2005 I worked on a game with this exact issue. We placed a plane in the boats that had a transparent shader on it that was set to draw before the water plane. This forced a sort order “problem” that made the water inside the boats not appear even though it was there. Hopefully that’s enough to get you started.
My man you are HUGE.
Btw a big big suggestion:
Your voice is nice and calm but you are putting trash royalty free music in your background which are really out of place here, not only I dislike them, but I think the quality and seriousness of your videos are mismatching that music. Your voice alone is 10times stronger than combined with that kind of music. Trust me
Thank you for your feedback. I appreciate it.
Ben you have this software somewere in HDD? becouse its problem to download maybe link has expired ;(
If you're referring to the Flowmap Painter software, the link is working fine for me. Here it is again: teckartist.com/?page_id=107 You can also just do a Google search for "flowmap painter" and it's the first result.
@@BenCloward hmm strange I cant download after I click "Windows" nothing happend
Ah I see. Ok, do the following. Using Chrome, right click on the download link and choose "Save link as..." Then select the location on your machine where you want to save it. You'll then see a little note in the lower left of the browser that says "can't be downloaded securely." Click the little up arrow to the right of that message and select "Keep." All of this is happening because the owner of the web site as not yet enabled SSL on his server. It's not big deal - just makes it more annoying.
Underwater tutorial please.
this flow map painter kinda sux... ithere a better way to do it? Its difficult to push and pull.. every initial click messes up my current flow direciton.. not to mention it crashes on me quite often if i alt tab it enough times
Yes, I agree. It looks like Substance Painter can do it: helpx.adobe.com/substance-3d-painter/painting/advanced-channel-painting/flow-map-painting.html. And it looks like Krita can also do it: docs.krita.org/en/reference_manual/brushes/brush_engines/tangen_normal_brush_engine.html I haven't used either of these so I don't know how well they work.
Hey, Ben. I do have a question.
After I completed the full tutorial, i plugged the water ripple function back into the normal slot, to see the finished water with rain ripples. But i didn't see any. Maybe they were too small and were washed away in the waves. But no matter what i did they never appeared. Do you maybe know why?
Does it work if you plug in the rain ripple normals without the water normals? What does that look like?
@@BenCloward Wow you're incredibly helpful AND respond to questions. You really are gold brother lol
Without the normals added and using only the ripples, it works fine.
However i added the normals back in with the ripples and looked closer at the water and the ripples are there.
But there are very very few and they only show up at certain points in the waves.
It looks like they only appear at the peak of the waves . As soon as a wave passes, the ripples instantly disappear.
I believe the waves may be greatly distorting the ripples and it gives the illusion of them disappearing.
Sounds like you need to find a different method of combining the two normals if you want the rain ripples to show up more prominently after they’re combined.
Thanks for your tutorials. but if possible without background music.
the problem is that program is on Unity, and i hate Unity