Unreal Engine 5 & 4 · How to use

Ultimate River Tool

From an empty level to a flowing river in four steps — plus everything you need to know about painting foam and tuning parameters.

Quick start

Setup

  1. Add the Ultimate River Tool package to your project.
  2. Place the actor UltimateRiverToolContent\UltimateRiverTool\Blueprints\BP_UltimateRiverTool — into your level.
  3. Set up RiverWidth and Smoothness, then start creating the spline path for the river.
  4. Done!

Vertex paint

You can draw additional foam on the river using the Unreal Engine Vertex Paint tool (Shift+2) with the (0,1,0) color selected.

To paint visibility, paint a (visibilityrate, X, X) color, where visibilityrate = 0 is fully transparent and visibilityrate = 1 is fully opaque.

Attention: if you modify the Smoothness parameter, vertex paint will be discarded because the vertex count and positions change. Paint your vertices only after the Smoothness parameter is fixed.

Common parameters

All parameters are sorted into clearly named groups inside BP_UltimateRiverTool, so you can tune width, flow, foam, displacement and material settings from one place.

Watch

Ultimate River Tool in action

Drawing the river spline in-editor
Full video walkthrough

Get the tool

Ready to add flowing rivers to your world?