Legacy:Part 02 DM-Siesmic Canyon Shallow And Deep Water

I have UTEd4 running, I then click new in the tool bar and make an additive map, because I am not going to distribute this (infact I'm not even going to publish it), I will be able to directly use the textures and materials from my content pack.

So opening the Generic Browser, I ensure my content pack is loaded (ASphinx-Content).

I then throw down a real simple BSP level, I have chosen to have three rooms and two corridors connecting them, the first room has shallow water, the hall leading away also. The second room is deeper, and has a submerged corridor leading to the third room, which is as deep as the second, see Tile #01 to view my setup in the toolset.

The water surface is nothing more than a plane, you cna't use the BSP for this however, because of shadows and lighting, you will need a static mesh, fortunately UT3 has a built-in static mesh plane in the pre-loaded package named UN_SimpleMeshes, in the generic browser, find it, then right click it and select the option Fully Load, on the right hand side you should a few staic meshes with the default material.

Select the plane (named TexPropPlane_Dup).

Going back to the 3D Render viewport of your test level, right click on the ground, and add actor, the top option in the fold-out list should be the static mesh option, select it to place the mesh on the ground.

By default, this mesh stands upright, ie. not parallel to the ground, it is also one-sided, which means you might not see it from your current viewing angle, move around till you see the plane, if you are having troubles still seeing it, try press 'w', this is the key that toggles whether static meshes are visible or not, and you might have them turned off in your view port, and switch to rotation mode by pressing space, and rotate it so it is parallel to the ground, then pressing space twice more, raise it so it is 32 units above the ground surface.

The mesh itself doesn't actually fit my rooms which are 512x512 on the X/Y axis, if you measure the mesh, you will find it measures 320x320.

The scaling option will allow you to make the mesh fit more easily, I chose to place four of these meshes in each room, having one in each corner, matching up to each other seemlessly, I also made two of them fit in the 1st corridor, the second corridor is compleatly submerged, so it will have no water surface. You can see how I have lined these meshes up in Tile #02 (Don't forget to do the other room as well, it is not shown in the tile, but it will also have a surface), the ones in the corridor extend through the wall, this is so that the water surface textures don't have nasty seems across them.

The next step is to add the surface material we made in an earlier chapter, select all the planes we just put into the level, go to their properties. Under the StaticMeshActor -> StaticMeshComponent -> Rendering -> Materials, add a material by clicking the green + symbol on the right, click the magnifying glass to show the generic browser in the new line that appears below, and select the water surface material. By clicking the green arrow pointing left, which can be found back in the properties window directly next to the magnifying glass you just clicked to open the generic browser, you will assign the material to the mesh.

While still in the properties, you will need to navigate to StaticMeshActor -> StaticMeshComponent -> Lighting and uncheck the box next to bAcceptLights, finally to allow players to fall through this surface you will need to go to Collision -> CollisionType and change the value to COLLIDE_NoCollision.

Now we need to designate that the area under this mesh is actually a water volume.

You will need to shape your brush to fit the areas inbetween the surface and the ground, and add UTWaterVolumes to fill these areas, the UTWaterVolume can be found on the left under the Add Volume button.

After this I quickly jumped over to 3DS Max and threw together a quick mesh that will represent the fog volume, it was measured out to be exactly 1 unit smaller than the actuall area it is going to fill (ie. a 1 unit border all the way around), you can see it in Tile #03. I applied a material, and quickly set the UVWs, then imported it to UTEd4.

Image Tiles