I’ve spent an hour or so tinkering with a particle system to try to get it to behave live a waterfall: follow a horizontal surface and then drop to the ground when it reaches the edge. I have a particle collider attached to the particle GO and a box collider attached to my test cube.
Not the best waterfall to ever grace these forums, but it works.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XGVYUCzmSDM
What I did was to model out a strip of polygons that naturally flowed down the side of the hill. Same principle applies to a river or a waterfall over a cliff. Model a strip of polygons that will represent the area your waterfall will take up. You will want to lay out your UVs in a straight strip, no curved spots or distortion, nice and straight. Keep the UVs normalized in the 0-1 UV space in at least one axis, preferably the one that travels down the path of your waterfall. Now you have two choices, animate the UVs moving downward using the Animation Editor or animate the “water” texture map on your water material via the Shader. This will give the movement motion, the flowing look. At junctions and spots where the water moves around rocks or splashes onto crevices, etc…you can place particle FX for water spray. Add in a little smoky or steamy looking particle effect as well to make it look like mist coming up from the splashes. You can also use particle FX at the bottom where it flows into a lake or river…something that looks like rings flowing outward from the base or ripples in the water.
3 Likes
If you think it would be useful I can do a video tutorial on YouTube and demonstrate this process as fast as I can?