Hey everyone,
for placing water, try to avoid painting water on terrain or using the instance painter.
Especially the instance painter. Please don't use this for water, it will not work the way you want it to.
What we doFor big water bodies with different elevations and flow directions (f.e. NAT_Water_FJ_Ocean for Fort Joy ocean)-- Export the terrain to your 3d modeling environment. To make a custom mesh and import that back into the game as a root template.
-- Set "Wadable" to True on this root template
-- Create a custom flow map according to that model to make flow directions correct for rivers etc.
-- This is the difficult flow, which you don't have to really worry about since 95% of the cases can be covered with the flow below
For smaller situations and home-made maps (f.e. The Sandbox)-- Take a "NAT_Water_{Something}" root template.
-- Place multiple of these rectangular water planes / Scale the planes to cover the area where your water needs to be
-- Make sure the template you choose has a Physics Resource ID (or assign plane physics from the resource browser) and that the "Wadable" property is set to True. (A working example root template is NAT_WaterPlane_GM_Area_Cave_Generic_Physics_A)
Why?Wadable-- If set to true. AI grid generation will automatically treat the terrain under this scenery as walkable up until a fixed height (more or less human hip height). Used to automatically generate walk/block areas under water. Also automatically assigns "wet" status to my character walking into this water without having to paint water under it.
This only works when the root template has physics.Why not the instance painter?-- The instance painter is to paint random occurrences of scene fillers. Grass, bushes,... Water is not random,
you need to place these by hand according to your preferred level design. More importantly:
Instances don't have physics. So "Wadable" won't work and you have to paint walk blockers and water ai by hand, which is unfeasible if your terrain changes a lot.
Checking The Sandbox can be useful here. The river on the left side of the map uses the recommended approach.
Sincerely,
Kevin
