Tutorial #3: Water (click to download .UNR) | Author: MegaHertz | Last Updated: May 25th

Unreal Tutorial #3 Water Tutorial Introduction: This tutorial is designed to instruct you on how to add a simple pool of water to your unreal levels. This tutorial assumes that you have a basic understanding of how to create rooms and assign textures to them. If you are having trouble doing this, refer the documentation found in the help directory of the Unreal CD-ROM or Tutorial #1. If you have any suggestions, corrections or additional information please drop me some email at megahertz@smcgrath.com. It’s my hope that tutorials like this will help us all figure out UnrealED faster.

Starting Out:

Start out by making a decent sized room. Large enough so that you can place a hole in the floor of the room where the water will go and still have plenty of room to walk around it. Next size the carving brush down so that its about 1/5th the width and depth of the original room. Once your finished with that you should have something that looks similar to this:

(click on image to view full screen)

You’ll notice I went ahead and added some light actors and a playerstart actor, if u haven’t already done so, go ahead and do so now.

Adding the water:

Now we have to lay out where we want our water to begin. We’ll use whats called a zone portal to separate the empty space of our room from the empty space of the pit so that we can fill up the pit with water and not have it over flow into our room space. The way we create a zone portal is by using a sheet brush to create a plane that will completle separtate and cut off one area from the other. Click on the Use Plane icon and position like its shown here:

(click on image to view full screen)

Notice my red line is a little lower than the ground , this is because you’ll want a lip around your pool which makes it seem more realistic. Also when sizing your brush in the over head view , make sure it covers the entire area , the easiest way to do this is to use Snap to Grid scaling. If you don’t have the entire area completely sealed off, your whole room will be filled with water.

Now select the Brush menu and select Add Special, pull down the combo box and select water, then click on the Add Special button.

Now hit F8 and rebuild the geometry and the BSP. Now position your cursor in the 3d view on what would be the top layer of the water, you may have to re-orient your view to see it. The top of the brush should be highlighted with a blue tinge to it. Load up the liquids.utx file and assign a texture to the top of the water. Next browse the list of classes listed on the right side of the screen. Expand the info class, you should see another class called ZoneInfo, Expand this class and then highlight WaterZone. Go back to your 2d views and point to somewhere in the brush that will contain the water. Hold down the ‘A’ key and left click. A WaterZone icon should have appeared inside the water area of your level. If not , try clicking again.

Lets go for a swim:

You should now be able to compile your level one last time, and go swimming in your new inground pool, and don’t forget to invite me to your first pool party!! J

CONTACTING ME:

If you need more help or have some ideas, information, etc, you can reach me at megahertz@smcgrath.com . I can also be found on #UnrealED on EFNET irc.