Creating a Fluid surface with Blueprints and Render Targets - Tutorial should be revised

Well, I am at it again and coming from the previous tutorial “Creating a Heightfield painter” I was now doing the second, more advanced version of the documentation tutorial. Unfortunately, there are again a few quirks that I want to share and raise attention for.

2. Required Asset Creation & Setup

Besides [this bug reported here][1] that messes up the whole tutorial if you are using 4.15 (there should be a note about this or a bug fix), there is one more problem

This time, the author asks the user to work inside the ContentExamples project. The hard thing here is that the exact same naming scheme from the already exisiting FluidSurface content example is used. Thus, if the user has to fill in materials and textures inside the BP later on, one has to precisely check the asset path. Thus, I recommend using another naming scheme for the tutorial!

*3. Blueprint Setup

  1. Under point 4), the default value for the InteractionDistance is 1.0 and inside the BP, gets multiplied by 10. This is not far enough If you want to shoot at the fluid surface and most users are going to wonder why the BP does not work.
  2. There should be a note that the complete blueprint overview is on the next page or better, display the whole event graph BEFORE getting into the details for each part. This way, the user does not have to guess where the execution paths go.
  3. The BP checks for overlap events from the pawn but by default, if you set the Water Surface Mesh to SM_Plane1000_512, the plane has “BlockAll” set, thus no overlap events where fired in my case. I added a static mesh component and set it to overlap pawn to get it to trigger the respective events.

As a side note

As this tutorial is essentially the BlueprintFluidSurface content example, I think the content example should be retouched and the BP cleaned with the version from the tutorial. Maybe just without using the ApplyPointDamage event and instead creating a custom event. But overall, the current content example is super messy in comparison to the tutorial although it’s exactly the same BP content

VERSUS

https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/images/Engine/Rendering/RenderTargets/BlueprintRenderTargets/HowTo/FluidSurface/FS_Completed_Blueprint.jpg

bump bump bump