This was for an assignment during the last week in Level Assembly and Lighting at Full Sail University. The water was made mostly using a normal that I created in Photoshop and Crazy Bump. In order to do this just make a 1024 by 1024 document in Photoshop and make the black/white color options into light grey and dark grey. Then from the dropdown Filter>Render>Clouds. You can do this a couple times to get the pattern you like. Then copy that to clipboard and open Crazy Bump, paste that copy to clipboard. Once the image has been pasted to Crazy Bump you'll need to tweak the settings to make it look right. For waves you'll want to turn down the fine and medium details and turn up the large and extra large details. Copy this to clipboard again and take it back into Photoshop and save as a targa file.
Now that we have the normal map saved as a .tga file you'll need to import that and a poly plane (UV mapped) into Unreal Engine. Create a material as well and then open up the material and the poly plane options like so.
Once you have everything open you'll need to set up the water/wave to much more closely resemble actual water.
Here is a playlist of videos that I watched to get it all set up.
Once you have everything set up and a ground-like texture on the floor mesh it should look something like this.
This is just a very simple waterplane applied to a poly plane, I'm sure you can do something alot fancier but this was just a quick learning experiment. Thanks for checking in on this instructional blog post, and have a great day!
