Working on water is always a fun task for me, and during Wayfinder's early development I was working on both these and Ruined King's water systems at the same time, bouncing back and forth between Unreal and Unity as I tried different things in both, and translated what worked back into the other engine. Some things could not make the jump (Unity makes working with lighting far easier on a shader by shader basis, and Unreal's SDF system makes realtime interaction updates substantially easier), but much of the logic was able to translate.
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I worked extensively with Romain Durand on much of the water visual development, with us bouncing back and forth the early materials - he would set up the first visual target, I would translate it into a cheaper unlit material and add additional movement/interaction. At the time when we were working on this, Epic had not yet released its water plugin, so many of the features here are now supported baseline by Unreal, such as the underwater post-process and waterline, gerstner wave movement, improved control of each point in a river spline, but learning how to set these up prior to the plugin's release was a valuable experience nonetheless.
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Additional props, worldbuilding, and lighting shown were created through a combination of all of our fantastic artists, including Jesse Carpenter, John Stamos, Vincent Gros, Ranko Prozo, Romain Durand, Jasmin Hebezai-Fekri, and Tristan Faure. Concepts were primarily done by Baldi Konijin, Virginia Critchfield, Philip Karlov, Ludo Lullabi. Additional art assets were created by Dragonfly Studio, GFactory, and Vsquad. Lots of art direction and feedback from Andy Hansen as well. Everything was a huge team effort!
https://www.artstation.com/romaindurand
https://www.artstation.com/jessecarpenter
https://www.artstation.com/jstamos
https://www.artstation.com/vincentgros
https://www.artstation.com/rankoprozo
https://www.artstation.com/curlscurly
https://www.artstation.com/fauretristan
https://www.artstation.com/baldi-konijn
https://www.artstation.com/ludolullabi
https://www.artstation.com/vsquadstudio
https://www.artstation.com/andyh
Pingponging rivers with Romain, splash effects set up by Ryan Rosanky and FXville
Romain and I negotiated down to reasonably expensive waterfalls (we do not speak of the old ones)
River and lakes in the HIghlands
Early and more stylized water/foliage explorations
Early exploration of larger bodies of water
This unlit water material reacts to the directional light to adjust itself for different lighting scenarios and time of day
Early spline river blueprint and material iteration
The water was much more stylized from the start, but we settled on a more realistic approach for much of our environmental assets/shaders to help not detract from the stylized character effects
Early underwater post process and lake blueprint/material iteration