The waterfall system stays exclusive to Riverology. Oceanology Pro will not ship it, and Riverology 3 rebuilds it on the new core with splash and mist.
Waterfalls are the line between Riverology and Oceanology Pro. Pro is an ocean product: it ships the shared water core, the wave systems, buoyancy, swimming and the underwater stack, and it will not ship a waterfall generator. If your scene needs water falling off a ledge, Riverology is the product that carries it. Riverology 3 is where that system gets rebuilt on the Pro foundation, with splash and mist treated as part of the feature rather than as dressing you assemble yourself per scene.
Today the waterfall is a shading effect on the river surface, not a separate actor. A material function named MF Waterfall sits inside the river material and drives the cascade from the same flow machinery the rest of the river uses: a flow vector map, a direction function, and a fractional time input that ping-pongs the sample so the texture never visibly resets. Its inputs are Diffuse, Diffuse Alpha, Cascade Normals, Normal Map, Flow Vector Map, Speed, Flatness and Distortion. The white water is a separate texture pair on the Foam Generator with its own animation speed, tiling and mask threshold. Audio is a waterfall cue plus a set of splash wave assets. There is no Niagara system anywhere in the Riverology 2 plugin content.
The Pro core already exposes the two hooks a splash-and-mist system needs. The Niagara water data interface answers GetWaterDataAtPoint and GetWaterSurfaceInfo, returning surface position, water depth, water velocity, the water plane position and normal, wave height, and whether the sample sits inside an exclusion volume. That is enough for particles to know where the water is and how fast it is moving without manual setup. On the physics side, the shallow water simulation accepts impulses with a radius, a height impulse, a foam impulse, a relax rate, a swirl speed and an elliptical footprint controlled by a yaw angle and an axis ratio, which is how a plunge pool gets disturbed by the water landing in it.
| Before | Oceanology Pro | |
|---|---|---|
| Waterfall geometry | The river spline mesh itself; the cascade is a material effect painted on that surface | Rebuilt on the Pro core water bodies |
| Splash and mist | Foam textures and audio cues; no particle system ships in the plugin content | Part of the feature, driven by live water data |
| Water data for effects | Read from river material parameters | Niagara water data interface: surface position, depth, velocity, wave height |
| Pool disturbance | None | Shallow water impulses with height, foam, swirl and an elliptical footprint |
| Availability in Oceanology Pro | Riverology only | Riverology only; Pro will not ship it |
| Waterfall foam texture pair | T FoamParticle, with T FoamParticle Normals |
| Waterfall Fast (animation speed) | 0.25 |
| Waterfall Scale (tiling) | 1.0 |
| Masking (foam visibility threshold) | 1.28 |
| MF Waterfall inputs | Diffuse, Diffuse Alpha, Cascade Normals, Normal Map, Flow Vector Map, Speed, Flatness, Distortion |
| Audio assets | One waterfall cue plus splash touch and splash impact waves |
| Shallow water impulse controls in the core | Radius, height impulse, foam impulse, relax rate, swirl speed, footprint yaw, footprint axis ratio |
This is one entry on the Galidar roadmap. For what already shipped in each release, see the Changelog.