Editor tooling

The in-editor tools the plugin ships: viewport pontoon editing, spline width, depth and flow handles, the wave preset editor, bakers and generators.

A water system is only as good as the hour you spend setting a river up. Oceanology ships a dedicated editor module that puts most of that work back in the viewport: pontoons are dragged rather than typed, spline width, depth and flow have grab handles, wave presets get their own asset editor with live water in it, and the bakers and generators are buttons on the objects they belong to rather than a separate utility window.

Pontoon editing in the viewport

The buoyancy component gets both a component visualizer and a details customization, and they work together. The visualizer draws every pontoon as a wire sphere directly in the level viewport; clicking one selects it and parks the standard move widget on it, so dragging the widget edits the pontoon's relative location in place - the same interaction model as moving an actor pivot. The details panel replaces the raw pontoon array with a per-pontoon editor: add, clear, duplicate and remove buttons, one collapsible group per pontoon exposing radius, relative location, centre socket and FX, and an Edit Pivot button that drives the viewport selection. It re-resolves the component after a Blueprint preview reconstruction, so it also works on a pontoon set authored on a Blueprint component template that has no owning actor.

Spline width, depth and flow

Water splines carry four per-point channels in their metadata, and each is editable both numerically and with a viewport handle.

• Depth - how deep the body is at that point. Feeds both the runtime query answer and the landscape carve.
• River Width - half-width to each side of the spline. Rivers only.
• Water Velocity Scalar - flow magnitude, applied along the spline direction.
• Audio Intensity - a scalar driving water audio along the spline.

The spline visualizer adds Visualize Water Velocity, Visualize River Width and Visualize Depth toggles. With one enabled, each key grows grab handles that hit-test separately from the key itself, so you drag width, depth or flow directly instead of typing curve values, and the flow arrows are scaled by the Visualize Water Velocity Scale editor setting. The metadata also interpolates correctly when you insert, duplicate or remove a point, so the channels survive spline edits.

The wave preset editor

Water wave presets and breaking wave presets are assets with their own toolkit. Opening either gives a viewport over an advanced preview scene with a real custom water body in it, and a details panel beside it, so parameter changes are evaluated on actual water rather than guessed from a thumbnail. The toolbar carries a Toggle Pause Wave Time command for freezing the spectrum and inspecting a single frame.

Baking and generation

• Wave Baker - the water actor's details panel gains Bake Waves, Save Textures and Clear Baked Textures buttons, wired to the actor's wave baker.
• Water zone controls - Start All Wave Simulation and Stop All Wave Simulation buttons on the water zone details.
• Shallow water controls - build rest state, bake, start, pause, stop and reset are all exposed on the water actor and callable from Blueprint as well as from the details panel.
• Caustics - a caustics generator actor that ticks in editor viewports and spawns the water preview grid and caustic particle grid used by the caustics texture generation Blueprint. The plugin ships its own render target sampling library so this no longer depends on the retired Landmass editor helper.
• Spline data generator - spawns, names and tags up to 21 spline actors, generates evenly spaced points, applies breaking wave physics data through Splash Impact, Surf Wave Height Transition and Ripple Wave Height Transition controls, and exports or imports the whole set as LUA.
• Material to struct converter - dumps a material's parameters into struct form for the wave and visual structs.

Debugging the surface in the level

The water surface debugger is an actor you drop next to a body and point at it. It ticks in editor viewports, samples a grid of world positions around itself, runs the same surface query gameplay uses, and draws a sphere at each result. Grid count, grid spacing, sphere radius, segment count, thickness and colour are all properties, so a wave setup or a shoreline attenuation can be checked at a glance without entering play.

Against editing by property

This is one entry on the Galidar roadmap. For what already shipped in each release, see the Changelog.