It’s not often something makes you stop in your tracks and just watch, but William Faucher's EasyWaterscape is a tool that did just that when I saw it – this water sim looks incredible, but importantly it brings a level of AAA-style ocean simulation to Unreal Engine and wraps it in a tool artists can actually enjoy using.
Water simulation is something gamers love to dwell on; just look at how incredible AC Black Flag Resynced looks, but making convincing water, and doing it in Unreal Engine, has always felt like a challenge easier said than done. Artists need to tweak wave settings for half an hour, realise the shoreline looks wrong, then spend another hour trying to get the foam to behave as our minds think it should. It's one of those effects that's easy to appreciate, loved by gamers, and surprisingly fiddly to create.
