(UE4) Nvidia Waveworks study - Sea Restaurant
polycounter lvl 8
Hi, last past months I started to study what we can achieve with nvidia waveworks, so I decided to download an engine branch and start playing around and see what this can offer for real time visualization.
My biggest issue was the lack of a wiki or online documentation, this makes the process tricky and stressful sometimes. So let me describe this project.
1) It was made on a branch of ue4.19
2) waveworks is awesome, very customizable and let us do things for many stuff we can imagine, from a simple visualization like this project, to an entire playable game who uses sea stuff as main scene.
3) there are limitations... from me firstly and from waveworks as well, for example: WW works as a procedural plane surface, it draws a bunch of squares planes to make it seamless and apply its properties. So, if we need to take WW to work on something that needs cut edge shape, to make the contour of this specific edge, this can be tricky to achieve.
3.1) Speak of this, the next scene i'm going to do will not use WW, because I need a full working volume without interferences of sea. For example: We can place islands and static meshes on both water surface and underwater, but if we need to control the sea level inside the volume we need to be lower or higher than the ww sea level, well I couldn't find a way to do that. So we cannot do submarines with big pools inside of it? yes, we will can because there are single ww planes to do that.
3.2) WW shoreline gave me a huge headache to configure, and unfortunately this not working on non looping shapes, like an island for example, my beach was made with a huge single static mesh, everytime I write the WW shoreline texture, it also make a full edge loop from the mesh of the beach.
sometimes it also didn't correctly draw the shoreline, making bizarre results
sometimes it make the shoreline with waves going from inside to outside of the plane subject (weird waves coming from land to sea, lol)
Also, I almost give up because i didn't knew we need to apply the WW shoreline capture material on place we want it to create a sea shoreline first, then capture it.
3.3) So, how I made my shoreline? I going to use a word we brazilians use too much, I did a "gambiarra" *(gambiarra is a quick fix, a improvisation, a way to make something working when you lack of knowledge or proper tools to do) I rotate and place my WHOLE map to get best usage of the current GDC wave works map test texture. Is it the best way to do that? no. Is this worked? hella yeah!
4) the performance is acceptable, the main scene have like 50 meters of beach width by over 100 of height, heavy using displacements planes for mesh blending and many things to make this little part of scene, I'm going to post later the full details and screenshots of individual assets I made and how I blend it, I know the blending is not perfect and far from ideal for optimization, but I used a fade nodes to fade the displacement and the general object distance on my materials, this made the scene pretty usable on viewport. also I made auto lods for pretty much everything.
4.1) I'm kind obsessed with material and mesh blending, still looking the best way to blend my meshes, I used the pixel depth nodes and quite achieve some ok results, but this is waaaay too buggy and sometimes produces weird shadowing like a friend of mine said, even when we double check all static meshes on the scene. I hope epic brings to us a better way to blend meshes and materials soon...
5) I used some ready assets from marketplace and megascans to do the foliage from lighthouse and main land, did my materials and texture using substances and substance painter for mix one or more texture. Also I used some assets from my previously scenes and reciclate it.
6) I said this is a sea restaurant right? but where is the restaurant!? yeah, I haven't started it yet, but this going to be in a other map separated from this map, there i'm not going to use waveworks due the limitations I said on *(3) also I will try to use raytracing from ue4.22 for this map 2 if it runs ok on my computer of course (I don't have any rtx card here, lets hope this allows me use RT for my archviz), if not I will use the lightmass gpu. This secene I used full movable lights.
When I finished the captures of video, I will post here, but I took some screenshots for now, you can check the full 25 screens here: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1-GaJV9bqPYQEb2jkIk4rH4htNUbvxcW8
here on topic I will post 7 of then:
If you have any question about waveworks, please feel free to ask and I hope I can reply to your question.
My biggest issue was the lack of a wiki or online documentation, this makes the process tricky and stressful sometimes. So let me describe this project.
1) It was made on a branch of ue4.19
2) waveworks is awesome, very customizable and let us do things for many stuff we can imagine, from a simple visualization like this project, to an entire playable game who uses sea stuff as main scene.
3) there are limitations... from me firstly and from waveworks as well, for example: WW works as a procedural plane surface, it draws a bunch of squares planes to make it seamless and apply its properties. So, if we need to take WW to work on something that needs cut edge shape, to make the contour of this specific edge, this can be tricky to achieve.
3.1) Speak of this, the next scene i'm going to do will not use WW, because I need a full working volume without interferences of sea. For example: We can place islands and static meshes on both water surface and underwater, but if we need to control the sea level inside the volume we need to be lower or higher than the ww sea level, well I couldn't find a way to do that. So we cannot do submarines with big pools inside of it? yes, we will can because there are single ww planes to do that.
3.2) WW shoreline gave me a huge headache to configure, and unfortunately this not working on non looping shapes, like an island for example, my beach was made with a huge single static mesh, everytime I write the WW shoreline texture, it also make a full edge loop from the mesh of the beach.
sometimes it also didn't correctly draw the shoreline, making bizarre results
sometimes it make the shoreline with waves going from inside to outside of the plane subject (weird waves coming from land to sea, lol)
Also, I almost give up because i didn't knew we need to apply the WW shoreline capture material on place we want it to create a sea shoreline first, then capture it.
3.3) So, how I made my shoreline? I going to use a word we brazilians use too much, I did a "gambiarra" *(gambiarra is a quick fix, a improvisation, a way to make something working when you lack of knowledge or proper tools to do) I rotate and place my WHOLE map to get best usage of the current GDC wave works map test texture. Is it the best way to do that? no. Is this worked? hella yeah!
4) the performance is acceptable, the main scene have like 50 meters of beach width by over 100 of height, heavy using displacements planes for mesh blending and many things to make this little part of scene, I'm going to post later the full details and screenshots of individual assets I made and how I blend it, I know the blending is not perfect and far from ideal for optimization, but I used a fade nodes to fade the displacement and the general object distance on my materials, this made the scene pretty usable on viewport. also I made auto lods for pretty much everything.
4.1) I'm kind obsessed with material and mesh blending, still looking the best way to blend my meshes, I used the pixel depth nodes and quite achieve some ok results, but this is waaaay too buggy and sometimes produces weird shadowing like a friend of mine said, even when we double check all static meshes on the scene. I hope epic brings to us a better way to blend meshes and materials soon...
5) I used some ready assets from marketplace and megascans to do the foliage from lighthouse and main land, did my materials and texture using substances and substance painter for mix one or more texture. Also I used some assets from my previously scenes and reciclate it.
6) I said this is a sea restaurant right? but where is the restaurant!? yeah, I haven't started it yet, but this going to be in a other map separated from this map, there i'm not going to use waveworks due the limitations I said on *(3) also I will try to use raytracing from ue4.22 for this map 2 if it runs ok on my computer of course (I don't have any rtx card here, lets hope this allows me use RT for my archviz), if not I will use the lightmass gpu. This secene I used full movable lights.
When I finished the captures of video, I will post here, but I took some screenshots for now, you can check the full 25 screens here: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1-GaJV9bqPYQEb2jkIk4rH4htNUbvxcW8
here on topic I will post 7 of then:
If you have any question about waveworks, please feel free to ask and I hope I can reply to your question.
Replies
from foliage lods, to camera focus on some cameras, framerate was 30 and having crazy aliasing with cinematic quality.
so, I think today on sunday I will be able to finish the video and reupload to youtube with new camera cuts and these issues fixed, only on this scene I couldn't iron the aliasing, even with post process to 400 and quality on cinematic, didn't tested the MSAA, but temporal is struggling to get rid off.
here is the lighthouse, I couldn't upload the marmoset viewer because, yeah i'm not pro user there yet.
link: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/PmElJ8
Will post more after finish the video.
link to the project on artstation:
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/rR0kdE