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Media 1 for listing Ocean Waves

Description

The main goal of this project is to visualize the ocean in real time at different scales, from camera positions directly on the water surface to views from orbit. For real-scale scenes (where planet radius is order of 1000 km or 108 cm), orbital flight implies that the camera can approach the surface of the water in regions very far from the world origin, which gives rise to all the challenges associated with a loss of precision of floating point numbers. In this regard, the default configuration of the ocean materials sacrifices certain fine detail effects (such as Lumen Reflections) in order to achieve an acceptable visual experience in any region of a planet. Please see NotesOnMaterials for more details.

Most ocean materials require special blueprints that configure material parameters during editing and update their values based on camera position and movement during gameplay. Therefore, such materials may appear differently during editing and gameplay.

In addition to the above, the certain type of blueprints is responsible for creating spherical meshes that approximate the surface of a perfect sphere at different levels of detail. All spherical meshes are created once during the game, and then their visibility is switched depending on the relative position of the camera. Depending on the number of vertices, creating the mesh can take a fair amount of time, given the fact that all the work is done in blueprints (although mesh creation in a packaged project with the Shipping configuration is noticeably faster than in the editor, for the number of vertices on the order of one hundred thousand it is still quite slow).

In its current state, this project does not contain any system that models the physical interaction of scene objects with the ocean.

Please try the demo to evaluate whether the trade-off between performance and visual quality that this project can provide meets your requirements. Note that performance and image quality may vary in projects with a configuration other than the demo configuration. In the demo, you can press Ctrl + Num 1 to toggle the FPS counter. Other information about the controls can be found in the main menu, which is opened by pressing the M or Escape buttons.

The UE5.4 project version works only with SM6 selected as the targeted shader format for DirectX 12, or SM5 selected for DirectX 11.

Please note, due to licensing requirements, the following assets are not included in this project (some of them are replaced with meshes derived from the Landscape tool and Geometry Brushes):

All four assets are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution and are presented in the images, videos, and the demo with modified textures and materials for the demonstration purposes.

Included formats

  • logo of Unreal Engine format