Fishies - UE5 project on Stylized Ocean Environment

This project is a standalone educational project on the topic on creating a stylized ocean environment in Unreal Engine 5.

figure 01: Final Scene 2

Preface

This project consist of multiple areas of shader works including waves, water effects, WPO animation shaders, postprocessing effects, multiple other shaders used for water related environment with Unreal Engine material system and custom HLSL nodes, as well as using UE5's Niagara particle system grid3D for simulating boids.

In this README, I will only list out techniques I've experimented with and some visual of the stages of the implementation. The area of coverage is larger than I initially expected. With that being said, it’s possible that I have made some mistakes and misunderstanding, in which case, please feel free to correct my understanding　(´・ω・｀).

The full article will be more detailed about implementation stages and techniques I've experimented. To read it, please check my github blog under the following url below. Article here

Implementation stages

Part 1: Waves- Sine Waves, Gerstner Waves, Scrolling waves

• Here I've tried multiple implementation of WPO wave shaders such as sums of sine waves and sums of gerstner waves.
• I've also used scrolling normals, 2 sided plane waves, fresnel, depth-opacity, and added refraction for water shader.

figure 02: Waves testing room

figure 03: Gerstner Waves with added effects

Part 2: Fishes - Boids

• I've used UE5 Niagara Particle system's Neighbor Grid3D as the acceleration structure for boids.
• There are 3 variants of boids implementation I've done
  • 1 Species boids
  • Multi-Species boids
  • Predator-Prey system

figure 04: 2 species boids

Part 3: Effects and Props - Caustics, Post-Processing, Foilage, Setting up final Scene

• The feature of caustics are created with voronoi based scrolling texture distorted by another scrolling texture
• The postprocessing material have scene depth based visibility and depth color based on the distance from the sea-level.
  • The depth-based visibility uses a combination of custom depth and scene depth to fix issue where the area that points to the sky is invisible.
• Foliage is animated using combination of wave functions for WPO

figure 05: Seagrass

figure 06: Final Scene

Simplified Directory Structure

├───blueprints
├───levels
├───materials
│   ├───boids
│   ├───caustics
│   ├───landscape_sand
│   ├───placeholder_materials
│   ├───post_process
│   ├───rocks
│   ├───seagrass
│   ├───test
│   │
│   ├───textures
│   │   ├───rocks_1024_FINAL
│   │   ├───sacabambaspis_tex
│   │   ├───sand_1024
│   │   └───seagrass_256
│   └───waves
│       ├───gerstner
│       └───sum_of_sines
├───mesh
└───particles
    ├───boids
    └───grid3dDebug

Levels

Level	Description
waves_test	room for testing waves and ocean related materials
boids_test	room for testing boids
demo_scene	final scene with all the older assets intact
final_scene1	Setup for camera 1 with some assets removed
final_scene2	Setup for camera 2 with some assets removed

References

• https://developer.nvidia.com/gpugems/gpugems/part-i-natural-effects/chapter-1-effective-water-simulation-physical-models
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PH9q0HNBjT4
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kGEqaX4Y4bQ
• https://cs.stanford.edu/people/eroberts/courses/soco/projects/2008-09/modeling-natural-systems/boids.html
• https://people.ece.cornell.edu/land/courses/ece4760/labs/s2021/Boids/Boids.html
• https://matthias-research.github.io/pages/tenMinutePhysics/11-hashing.pdf
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=82asza6Kv24
• https://www.youtube.com/@BenCloward