Currently available as part of the monthly Epic Games Unreal Engine marketplace giveaway for September 2020, today we are going to go hands on with UIWS. UIWS, or the Unified Interactive Water System is an extension or add-on for UE 4 that makes it incredibly easy to add interactive water to your game.
With a regular MSRP of $456.61 CDN ($350USD) this is among the most expensive of assets that have been released for free as part of the monthly giveaways. Even if you aren’t using Unreal Engine now it is certainly worthwhile creating a free account and “buying” the free monthly assets each month in case you change your mind in the future.
Key features of UIWS include:
- Real-time fluid interaction with caustic reflection and refraction.
- Any body size, Any body count
- Automatically interacts with any object, mesh, or even particle effect.
- Collision and damage particle effect spawning, out of the box
- Water sim affects foliage
- Designer friendly – easy to setup, no restriction on body scale or number. Just beautiful water for your game!
- Easy to customize in editor or via Blueprint.
- Optional full manual control over all systems via blueprint or c++ events and override
- Underwater post processing
- Well optimized for a wide range of target hardware
- NEW – Low end (Nintendo switch/mobile) aggressive optimization options
- NEW – Spline Rivers
- NEW – Custom Mesh Support
- NEW – Physical Ripple Reflection
You can learn more about UIWS on their homepage available here and it can be purchased on the Unreal Engine marketplace here. You can see UIWS in action and see a brief tutorial on how to setup and use it to create lakes and rivers for your game in the video below.