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Eric Anderson presented a series of demos showcasing a marvelous FFT-based digital ocean.
While most people, without a doubt, decided to indulge in leisure and take a respite from work-related thoughts during the winter break, Tech Artist and Art Director Eric Anderson took a more productive approach, dedicating his free time to creating an impressive ocean simulation in Unreal Engine 5.
According to the author, the setup utilizes Niagara compute grids with four cascades and then seamlessly applies the shader to Unreal's built-in ocean tools to ensure easy tessellation. Moreover, the simulation features great "fake" GPU-powered buoyancy and features pseudo-physics that work via mesh particles.
"As for the ocean, I'm literally just following in the footsteps of Deathrey and his amazing FFT tutorial," commented Eric on his workflow. "For the floaters, I'm essentially just repurposing the ocean data to detect whether particles are submerged (or colliding with each other), and applying simple vector forces.
You need to make sure to properly reproduce the WorldSpaceToUVW lookup logic, which is pretty easy. Just divide the worldspace XY by the corresponding CascadeSize to get the UV, and then sample the correct layer(W) of the VertexData RT."
You can learn more about the project and check out more demos by visiting the creator's Twitter page.
Previously, Eric also experimented with Morten S. Mikkelsen's approach to working with tiling textures without histogram-preservation, leveraging the method to set up a realistic-looking floor surface in Unreal Engine that looks anything but tiled.
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