I’ve recently been experimenting with the Gaea community edition, and have had great success in building landscapes, and bringing them into Unreal.
I wanted to open up a discussion around the use of Unreal Engine’s water body actors, which are spline based, and this point has been a little glazed over online, for most world creation tools ~ it would be a huge win if possible. Has anyone had success in transforming something like a height map for water, into something that UE5.7 can interpret?
For standing water, steps in my head would be → Standing Water Only Heightmap → Convert the top edges of geometry to a spline.
Flowing water would be something similar, with some trig to extract the center point of the two parallel edges.
Hey Josh,
To part some of my own high level wisdom on this.
the main ideas is to convert HF data to spline data.
often this is done by “skeletonising” data.
basically converting from x to line
Usually this is done via something like Houdini.
Perhaps a WF could partially adapted in Gaea.
It also look like Unreal also wants addition data as well, not just your typicaly co-ord .csv file, which is why you may be only finding scattered rather than concise information.
cramming in cloud points is also a possibility from Gaea, but there does seem to be a middle point required overall.
In my workflow, I incorporate splines for specific water bodies such as lakes. I utilize a simple Python script to convert the water body geometry into splines.
as example i just load the water mask and then convert it to a spline with some smoothing and detail parameters.
Thank you both, this has been really useful. I’ve set out to build a little python application to perform the conversion for rivers. I’ve made some good progress today. Next up is looking at height scaling & performance impact, but things are ticking along so far!
Spline points are now ordered to support UE5.6 Shallow Water Body simulation. Within Unreal, the ‘first spline point’ will always be the highest point on the river.
Additional improvement not screenshotted is that if a river mesh would be ‘fully submerged’ by an Ocean or Lake body, the spline will be discarded. I feel like the home stretch is on the horizon .
Will tidy up scripts before packaging up on GitHub, circa 6 to 8 weeks
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