How can I make a low-poly surface move like water by driving the vertices individually?

Hello all,

I really only have a general knowledge UE4. I just wanted to get that out there first thing.

I have a stylized, low-poly exploration and story driven game I’m slowly developing. The key to this game will be atmosphere and style and I want to make sure everything fits together well. Below are a few snaps of what it looks like.

As you can see in the second photo I have a body of water in my world. As you can also see the water texture doesn’t fit the style I’m going for. I’m looking for that low-poly, papercrafty look that’s all the rage with the cool kids these days. I could try and make a texture and animate it like the water texture is but I want to go one step further:
I want to animate the surface on the water by moving the vertices individually, driven by some perlin noise probably, and have it react to the player as they collide with it.

I’m using a triangulated plane I modeled in Maya as my landscape and it looks like this:

My main question is how can I achieve this goal? I don’t care if it’s done in UE4 or Maya or C++ or whatever, I just want to make this vision a reality!

Any and all help is appreciated!

Thanks so much!

You are just in luck. My good friend Jan has an excellent tutorial on just how to do that!

LowPolyWater

I could kiss you on the mouth but that could get weird…

Thank you very much!

LMFAO. No problem! Good luck!