Misc Tools
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This is a new water shader we introduced in our 1.9 update.
For quite some time our users requested a water shader that comes with waves, Caustics and underwater effects. Now it's all there! By going to the Create tab, you will find the Advanced Water shader. Click on it and there you have it! This shader comes with a rain-on-water effect as well.
For the best reflection results, we recommend you to enable Hardware Ray Tracing on your project
Let's go through how to use our Advanced Water and some of its Properties: Creating Water: In the Dash Toolbar we go to the Create tab, and in the dropdown menu, we select Create Advanced Water.
There are several properties to play around with in order to get a result that suits you; In the Tools Panel, you can tweak the values of the properties to get the best result for your project.
Let's dive into the available properties of our Advanced Water Shader, Starting with Base Properties:
Surface Proximity Color controls the color surrounding the objects overlapping your water. Depth Color controls the perceived depth color. Calmness which controls the agitation of the water. The higher the number, the calmer the water. Water depth allow you to set the distance at which you want your river bed to be visible. Foam Surface Proximity sets the amount of visible foam. Water Undulation controls the intensity of the Wave Undulation. For calm waters, a small value like 0.1 and below should be ideal. Wave Height controls the height of the wave. Wave Length controls the size or tiling of the wave. Wave Sharpness controls the smoothness of the wave. Wave Speed Controls the speed of the wave.
These settings work hand in hand and are the key to having nice waves and Undulations.
In the video below, we will go through some settings.
Based on your requirements you can set the Calmness and Water Depth to behave as you want. Check the example in the video below:
We have some additional Properties that allow you to have more control over how the normal map of the water behaves.
Rotation: Gives you full control over the direction of the water normal map Foam Tiling: This controls the tiling of foam, the bigger the value, the smaller the foam. Foam Depth: The depth in which the foam is still visible. This also allows you to have more visible foam on the edges of an asset. Wave Undulation Strength: Controls the undulation of the water normal map. Wave Strength: Defines the intensity of the water normal map. Wave Size: Controls the tiling of the normal map. Rain: Control the amount of rain ripples on the water surface. Ripple Tiling: Controls the Size of the Rain Ripple.
Let's get to the Underwater Properties. These properties gives us full Art Direction of how we want our under water to look like.
Under Water Fog Color: Determines the color of the fog. Underlying Color: This is the color of the underwater. Usually it's like green moss. Underlying Roughness: This value represents the wetness of the under water. which usually is fully wet by default. Underlying Hue: The hue of the underwater. Fog Distance: This is the amount of underwater fog. For a more foggy effect it is ideal to have a fairly small value. Something like 0.08 and below should be a good start. Blurriness: Controls the sharpness of the underwater. Underwater Warping: This gives you that beautiful warp effect when you go underwater. Underwater Brightness: This is to control the underlying brightness. Underwater Saturation: This works well with underlying hue. it controls the underlying saturation. Bloom Intensity: Controls the underlying Bloom effect.
In the video below, we are going to go through some essential Properties:
Last but not least, this new Water Shader includes some nice Caustics, with a bunch of controls to own its look.
Caustic Intensity: Defines the intensity and brightness of caustics. Caustic Scale: Controls the Scale or Tiling of the caustics. Caustic Speed: This controls the speed at which the caustics move. Caustic Rotation: Controls the rotation of the caustic in degrees.
We hope this new shader will help you create some cool projects and give you control over every aspect of how you want your water to look.
When creating a scene, we often want to add some leaves falling in a certain direction to make our environment feel more lively. All this is now possible with a single click.
In the Dash toolbar go to the Create menu and select Create Falling Leaves. Some beautiful leaves with all the settings necessary for nearly any scenario will appear in your scene. In your Tools Panel you can control several aspects of the tool.
The following Properties give you full art direction of your falling leaves.
Leaf Spawn Rate: Controls the amount of leaves that are being spawned. Spawn Radius: The radius in which they spawn, the bigger the value, the larger the radius. Wind Speed X: Control the speed of the wind on the X axis Wind Speed Y: Control the speed of the wind on the Y axis Min Hue: Define the starting hue of the random hue the leaves will have. Max Hue: Define the last value of the hue. These 2 values together give you a range of Hue. Wetness: Define the roughness of the falling leaves. Saturation: Controls the saturation of the color of your leaves. Min Leaf Rotation: Control the minimum speed in which the Leaves rotate on themselves. Max Leaf Rotation: Control the maximum speed in which the Leaves rotate on themselves. The video below is a demo of our falling leaves:
In the case of the Tools Panel not appearing automatically when you create the water,, make sure the water actor is selected, then click on the Edit button up in the Dash bar. Our Tools panel will appear. Then click the menu button in the top left of the Tool Panel to open the list of active tools, in which you will see the Falling Leaves tool.
