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Adaptive water creation for Unreal Engine

Create rivers, lakes, and oceans through one unified, artist-friendly PCG workflow. Draw rivers and lakes directly in the level, generate terrain-aware river paths and directional flow, then connect the result to materials, interactions, buoyancy, audio, weather, and gameplay systems.

Built for practical open worlds

Calysto Water Engine handles most scene preparation in the editor, freeing up more of your runtime budget for gameplay and the rest of your world. Instead of relying on continuous Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) simulation as its primary wave-generation method, it uses texture-based water data generated through Procedural Content Generation (PCG).

Core features

Procedural water creation

• Unified water system: Create rivers, lakes, and oceans using a single shared material workflow.

• Drawing tools: Draw rivers and lakes directly inside Unreal.

• Smart terrain-aware pathfinding: Analyze the landscape to generate rivers.

• Automated directional flow: Generate flow that adapts water movement.

Water rendering and customization

• Customizable master material: Control water color, transparency, distortion, surface normals, foam, and caustics.

• Adaptive water behavior: Transition between calm water, directional river flow, and open-ocean waves.

• Shoreline and contact effects: Generate shoreline masks, contact foam, lakebed blending, and landscape wetness.

• Underwater environments: Depth and distance fog, light scattering, caustics, and view distortion.

• Static Mesh wetness: Automatic waterline wetness to rocks, cliffs, props, and Megascans materials.

Gameplay and interaction

• Runtime water interaction: Add reactive movement, foam, and Niagara effects to characters, vehicles, creatures, and other Blueprint actors.

• Custom Niagara support: Build water interactions using the included water query and simulation data.

• GPU buoyancy: Query water height directly in materials for lightweight visual buoyancy.

• CPU buoyancy and watercraft controls: Add physics-based floating objects and arcade-style watercraft movement through an optional free buoyancy plugin.

• Water detection: Query water height and contact information from Blueprints, materials, PCG, and gameplay systems.

• Blueprint weather controls: Adjust wave amplitude, river flow speed, ocean speed, and water clarity at runtime.

• Procedural water audio: Automatically place calm-water and rapid-water sounds around rivers, lakes, and shorelines.

Performance and scalability

• Editor-generated PCG data: Perform much of the scene-specific preparation in the editor instead of continuously at runtime.

• Scalable performance settings: Control water mesh quality, interaction resolution, update frequency, generated texture resolution, and feature distances.

• Optional material features: Disable rivers, ocean waves, caustics, and other unused features to reduce unnecessary runtime work.

• World Partition workflows: Designed for large environments and practical gameplay-focused open worlds.

• AI-friendly documentation: Structured procedures, exact asset and parameter names, and detailed technical references support both human readers and reliable AI-assisted setup, integration, and troubleshooting.

Works standalone — or with Calysto World

Calysto Water Engine is a complete standalone system. When combined with Calysto World, generated water data can also guide procedural vegetation, rocks, biome details, underwater placement, and floating objects according to water influence, estimated depth, and water level.

Special thanks to Tim from PCGEx for his support, guidance, and expertise throughout development.