Modify vertices position in materials?

Hi, I’ve decided to really start learning UE4 and will start so by simulating water. My thought was to use a flat grid plane and modify its vertices position. I’ve been taking a course in computer graphic were we did shader programming in openGL.
How would this be done in UE4? I read that you can write shaders in UE4 by c++, but also that materials where used for that purpose, but how do you apply that shader to a specific mesh?

Hey Eqric -

UE4 uses HLSL for all of our shaders. Normally these shaders are implemented through a visual scripting language in our Material Editor. In essence a material in UE4 is a shader. So, applying a material to a mesh is telling that mesh to render with that particular set of shader instructions.

Thank You

Eric Ketchum

Is it possible to modify position of a vertex with the material editor or can i only do so with c++ scripting?

Yes you can modify the position of a vertex using the World Position Offset input in the Material editor. This can also be used in conjunction with the tessellation multiplier if you need additional vertex for your model or want to smooth the vertex movement out.

Eric Ketchum