Water mesh does not exactly fit on terrain in height

I had following idea to overcome current water mesh limitations. 1) make water mesh in WM, 2) import in 3dsmax and create spline via vertex snapping on this water mesh and use it for construction of proper water mesh. Manual work, but for reasonable number of rivers doable.

So I ve imported it into 3ds max, had to trial error solve scale issues (I had to multiply by 2x to fit on terrain. Makes no sense even taking in account size of terrain inside WM and game engine. Well, OK, I can live with that). But I ve found, that there are small height imprecisions, so original mesh does not fit in some places well. Beginning fit, end fit (so height scale is OK), but not middle section. Mayby some rounding problem? Had anybody else tried game engine import? Thanks:

2 Likes

Currently, there are many limitations with water meshes. This is one of them.

If the app auto scales/smooths/ or decimates meshes while importing, the water mesh and terrain mesh won’t match. Same goes for “not calculating displacement properly”. MAX and vue are two of those apps. MAX requires manual displacement calculation, vue requires manual scaling to get the numbers right all around. And there’s bound to be a rounding error somewhere in both cases.

I use blender to scale both terrain and water meshes uniformly, according to real world units. Then the transforms can be applied to the meshes, so they import the same in every app.

Note: Water mesh should not be reduced in polygon count in wm, or decimated afterwards. That destroys the synergy between terrain and water. This is a design limitation IMO, and I hope a solution presents itself to @Stephen someday lol!

Well, problem is in whole mesh topology and UV mapping, but this is already known topic…I can workaround this manually, but it a least needs fitting mesh :slight_smile:

Maybe quick solution could be ability to export spline (at least from river device,spline there is already defined). Constructing water mesh from spline is trivial in any 3d modelling app.