Special Effects
UnrealED2 Tutorials by EZkeel

A room that fills with water

Email :EZkeel
Accompanied files : WaterTank.UNR

Due to the nature of the Unreal engine, this is not really possible to do but if you’re careful you can simulate it and persuade the player that this is actually happening. This may or may not be useful, but it will give you a technique that you may be able to adapt for your level. To go into every exact detail on how to create this would take me ages, so I'm going to assume you're familiar with most editing techniques. If you're in any doubt, open up the sample file in the editor and you'll see more clearly how I achieved this effect. There are disadvantages to this method, but if used cautiously it could work quite well.
Tutorials you will need to have read are: Movers, Zones

1) Subtract a large cube from your world say 2048 x 2048 x 2048 and light it as you see fit.

2) Now create a room based on a hollow cube. The room itself needs essentially to be an added brush. Add what ever details you need but don’t bother with any actors or semi-solids. Make it around 512 x 512 x 512.

3) Once you’re happy with your room, rebuild, save and intersect the whole room and add it near the top of your first subtracted cube as a mover. You can delete what you used to create your mover with now and rebuild.

4) Now build a sheet and create a water zone sheet so that it overlaps the width and bread of your subtracted cube (say 2060 x 2060). Add it so that it just overlaps the floor of your moving room. Add a waterzone info actor to in the subtracted cube but below the water sheet.

5) Set the mover to “trigger toggle”, set the move time to something like 15 seconds and make keyframe 1 so that the room is completely underneath the water sheet. You could also give the looping ambient sound for the room a waterfall noise to add effect.

6) Add a light so that it lies centrally within the room and then add a player start just above the floor.

7) Now add a trigger somewhere in the centre of your moving room but close to the floor, set it to trigger once only and set its event field to the same as the tag field for your moving room.

8) Now test the level and walk to the centre of the room. You should see the water level rising and you with it. Obviously it’s the whole room that’s moving, but the illusion is that you have a room that’s filling with water.

9) Getting in and out of a room like this can cause complications when trying to keep up the illusion. I got around this by using a hole in the floor of the moving room and adding an extra mover to fill in the gap as a false floor. Both the fake floor and the room would move down simultaneously in the same time, but the fake floor had an extra keyframe which dropped down further once the room had stopped. You entered the room via a teleport. You may find another approach to do this, this is just one method.