Making Waterfalls
The waterfall
<Insert basic waterfall tutorial here>
things to cover:
- choosing a texture
- Surface Properties Window: stretching the texture & setting panning flag
- set panning speed in ZoneInfo
The Finishing Touches
Fog
A waterfall needs some kind of fogging. There are several way to accomplish this.
- You can add some sheet (like you do when making flames) and give them a fog-textures. But this only works when the player isn't able to get really close to that waterfall. Cos if you get to close, the fog will not look that great.
- You can use a SmokeGenerator. Do remember that they'll need to be triggered, before they will emit fog.
- Or, the best of the bunch is to use real fog!
Ripples
To create one large, localized ripple effect in the water surface:
- Create a square, horizontal sheet brush. The size depends on how big you want the ripples to be.
- add it as a non-solid 1 unit above the water surface
- apply the texture HubEffects.WaterRings2. It's a greyscale texture, designed (presumably) specifically to be used with the "modulated" effect.
Question: are there any other textures like this, whether watery or not? - Set the Surface Flags (UT) to Unlit and Modulated
I've found that because the ripple isn't quite centred on the texture, a sheet of size 96 goes with texture scale of 1, 192 with 2, etc.
This effect is seen in Unreal 1's "Nyleve" level (check...? it's the first outdoor level in the game), and more recently in JB-Pressurized for Jailbreak.
Sound
Don't forget to add ambient sound to your waterfall. This is VERY important, because a waterfall without sound is very unrealistic. Also, the ambient sound can be quite loud, to give the waterfall more 'power'.
Note that you don't need to add an AmbientSound (UT) actor specifically, you can set the Sound properties of any actor that's already in the right place – the SmokeGenerator would do fine if you're using one.
Try adding a very loud sound next to the waterfall with a small radius so that it sounds very loud when you are near it, then add another one which is a lot quieter but with a very large radius so that you can hear the waterfall slightly from a long way away.
