[Feature request] - fully functional OCEAN material/plugin

UE4 seems to have almost every conceivable feature that I could ever need in an engine.
However, a big missing feature for me is good-looking water that can be use for oceans, rivers, lakes, pools, etc.

I have seen the vaOcean plugin and it looks great, but does not (yet?) do things like:

  • crest foam
  • terrain border foam
  • boat wakes
    …and depth/fog colouring (below the terrain) that I am used to.

I have also seen other attempted implementations all of which are works in progress and never quite complete in one way or another:
e.g.
UDK - Water with Flow Map - YouTube (nice, but no big waves and pre UE4)
- YouTube (nice, but no foam/depth colour).

I would really like to know if UE4 have any plans to add fully functional water/ocean material in the near future?

(Water that is interactive would be a bonus, but that is probably expecting too much).

Epic tends to focus on the underlying low level systems to enable you to build your own implementations instead of creating high level systems for specific problems. So don’t expect an integrated one click ocean solution any time soon.

However you can expect them to improve things like translucent surface rendering as the current implementation isn’t ideal for large surfaces such as oceans. (Which is probably why that vaOcean example you linked uses opaque materials)

Ok, fair enough.

I thought ‘water’ (like in other engines) might qualify as a default natural environment asset just like a terrain editor, foliage painter and sky, all of which (as an artist) I couldn’t implement myself without programming knowledge.
Nonetheless, I understand what you are saying (about focus on low level systems).

Hopefully in the future when translucency is resolved there will be a nice demo to show it off (or hopefully vaOcean will be updated). Nonetheless, I would happily purchase such an asset from the marketplace if one was available.

Anyway, it is early days so I’m sure it will arrive in the future.

Hi Ash22,

We are continually improving and adding to the engine. There may be instances in the future where Epic may provide something through the Marketplace that you can migrate to your game. Some users on the forums have designed their own plug-ins with a fairly extensive set of features that you can implement in your game.

Thank you!