New Windsurf Ability! :D

All righty ladies and gentlemen; here is the mechanic that I have been extremely excited to show you all for a while. Introducing Juda's new ability: Windsurfing!

After a ton of tweaking and a lot of problems, I finally have the windsurfing mechanic working and it feels sooooo satisfying going up and down with the waves. This was a huge beast to tackle so I will boil it down into the basics of how it was achieved.

1. The water shader is an asset from the unreal marketplace
2. The water shader comes with a function that tells me the wave height at any given time
3. Unfortunately, the material itself does not match where the collision of the plane happens, so colliding (having Juda stay atop the waves) was simply not working
4. Therefore, instead of having Juda collide with the material, I added a separate plane that is invisible but does have collision. Additionally, I added a volume on top and below the water to determine if Juda is above or below the water.
5. Whenever Juda is close to the water, the function fires frequently enough to move the invisible plane up and down with the water material.
​6. It took a ton of tweaking to make it feel right, but now it works great! Now I can simply drag and drop the water bp into my levels and have it automatically work