Making Waterfalls
Creating The Waterfall
This is a tutorial for a texture that is already moving.
1 Choose a nice location for your waterfall. Make sure that you have a river or lake or something at the end of the waterfall.
2 Open the texture pack HubEffects, it has a nice waterfall texture called Waterfall2. Select it.
3 Create a sheet. The best way to make the waterfall look nice with this texture is by making the height 4 times as high as the width . Rotate the red builder brush and move until it sits where you want it.
4 Click on the Add Special Brush button, and choose water. Or you can add it, go to surface properties and select translucent at the surface flags.
5 Go to surface properties (press F5) ==> alignment. Scale your texture so you have 1 waterfall. To do this easily (with this texture), do the width of the sheet divided by 64, and use that number as the scale.
The waterfall should look good now.
This is a tutorial for a texture that isn't moving.
1 Choose a nice location for your waterfall. Make sure that you have a river or lake or something at the end of the waterfall.
2 Open the texture pack GenFluid. go to Water, and select one of the two textures called waterfa2 or waterfal.
3 Create a sheet. The best way to make the waterfall look nice with this texture is by making the height twice as big. Rotate and move the red builder brush until it sits where you want it.
4 Click on the Add Special Brush button, and choose water. Or you can add it, go to surface properties and select translucent at the surface flags.
5 Go to surface properties (press F5) ==> alignment. Scale your texture so you have 1 waterfall. To do this easily (with this texture), do the width of the brush divided by 64, and use that number as the scale.
6 Go to Flags in the surface properties window, and select V-pan. (press the realtime preview button to see it move smoothly). Sometimes the waterfall goes up. You can fix this by either rotating the texture (surface properties ==> alignment and press flip V) or by moving the brush upside down.
7 You can see that the waterfall isn't moving very fast. To make it go more rapid, add a zone info (actor (UT) ==> info (UT) ==> ZoneInfo (UT)) in the area of the waterfall. go to the ZoneInfo's properties ==> ZoneLight ==> TexVPanSpeed and increase that number. I think 4 is enough.
And thats it. Your waterfall is done.
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.
