How to make a water plane in 3ds Max

Development World Creation
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1

So I’ve been using an old plane mesh I downloaded from a tutorial a while back for my ocean waves (so I never learned how they are setup lol), and I have no idea how to actually make one myself. The few I’ve tried to make come out extremely blurry and the tessellation doesn’t work too well.

I have a working tessellation water/ocean material, but the mesh I used it on is quite small + loses a lot of detail when scaled up.

So how would I go about making/preparing one of these planes for my tessellated ocean material?
Step by step instructions if possible so I can finally get this done right lol.

Thanks in advance :slight_smile:

2
  1. Create new scene
  2. Edit Units Setup… to make display units be centimeters, and World Units be centimeters (the second is most important)
  3. Click the “sun” icon that creates new geometries
  4. Click the “plane” geometry
  5. Roll out the “Keyboard Entry” panel
  6. Enter the width, height, and tesselation you want of the water plane
  7. Press Create
  8. Add a UVW Map modifier
  9. Set it to Planar mapping
  10. Set the U tile and V tile values to whatever number seems reasonable (say, 1 per 300 units of width/height, so if it’s 3000 wide, set it to 10)
  11. Add another UVW Map modifier
  12. Change the UV channel for this modifier to channel 2
  13. Leave the UV tiling at 1 – this channel is for light mapping
  14. Save your scene, and then export as FBX as per the Unreal FBX content pipeline documentation for Static Meshes
  15. Import into Unreal Engine
  16. Open up the mesh by double-clicking, and change the “light map coordinate” set to set 1 (it defaults to 0) – coordinate set numbers are 1 lower in UE than in Max
  17. Place a copy of this mesh in the world
  18. Drag the Water - Ocean standard material onto this imported mesh
  19. Success!
3

Hey so I followed what you said, but my larger version still doesn’t quite look right. The tessellation is off still (It moves, but it’s very subtle/weak compared to the smaller scale one).

Do I need to change the tessellation in the material when it’s used with a larger sized plane? Or is is something else?

4

Fixed it, just needed to tessellate the mesh a bit more. Thanks for your help.