AQUAS Water/River Set - Water & Rivers for Mobile, VR, Web, Desktop

Hello @Alex3333

in short: Yep

Long version:
I'm an asset customer myself and I know how frustrating it can be, when you buy an asset that is generally good, but for some reason - not neccessarily related to the asset but rather to one's project - can't be used in the desired way or simply doesn't turn out to meet one's expectations in terms of look and/or functionality.

In such cases a refund would of course not be generally justified, however I usually offer one in such cases too, because I know, such things can happen and I don't want anyone to spend money on stuff they can't use, just as much, as I don't wanna waste my own money. There's not a lot of things more frustrating than having to be afraid of being left saddled with the costs when buying an asset and I don't want AQUAS to be such an asset.

Of course I'd have to change my policy on this, if I get the impression that this is being exploited, but up to this point I feel the AQUAS community has been extraordinarily nice and honest to me, so I don't see why I shouldn't try to behave accordingly.

 

@dogmachris , just regarding your advice to IFL above regarding open waters and and Aquas being a flat surface texture.

Can I confirm what the best solution to increase surface disturbance further away from the camera would be?

Currently when you look about 50 metres away from a solitary spot, the water surface is stationary.

I installed Aquas through the Gaia GX and My sky system is Tenkoku standard through the Gaia GX and am building a Pc game on 5.3.6f1.

By the way thanks for the boat advice, I'll have to look at that later when I grow more confident. I did run into the problem you suggested would happen with the fps.

 

Currently I'm trying Aquas for VR environments. Unity now has an option in VR mode called Single-Pass Stereo Rendering to force the camera to render the scene once. When I check this it makes the edges of Aquas water do this funky looking reflection thing. Anybody else see this or know how to fix this?

 

Single-Pass Stereo Rendering causes issues with the reflections because the reflections as they're produced now have to be rendered once for each eye to show correctly. We've run into this in the past, and @IFL has pointed out this issue as well. As of yet the only way I can guarantee reflections to work correctly in VR is by rendering for each eye separately.
I'm sorry I don't yet have a better solution for this.

One question though: What do you mean with the "edges" of AQUAS?

 

@TheSeawolf it's not actually stationary it's just that the speed of the surface disturbance doesn't increase the furthe you look, it stays the same over the entire distance. However it can look stationary if the distance blending is happening at a distance too close. How does it work, if you increase the medium- and far distance tiling and set the distance tiling fade value to 1.2?

 

Current VR prefab players now only have a 1 camera setup. In the past the Oculus OVR players used to have 2 cameras and they dont do it like that anymore it seems. Heres a couple screenshots of what I'm seeing using Single-Pass Stereo Rendering. I outlined in the screenshot what I'm seeing.

Oh also I took off the Reflection camera script, unchecked Enable Reflections in the shader. For more complex scenes in VR real time reflections not only run slow but do this weird cross eyed thing. That's why in Aquas the way you have it setup to run off a baked reflection probe is so awesome and crucial to not only get good looking running water in VR but still have some sort of "fake" reflection using that baked probe. If you can solve this last problem being single pass stereo rendering is gonna be huge for VR then Aquas takes over the VR water world

-Miguel

 

Can you hint me what settings may I use to get Aquas working with baked relfection probe? I know that it wouldn't be 100% solution as you said.

I have tried to find it in forum thread but without success.
Thanks
Peter

 

Ya just make sure your reflection probe that is a child of the Aquas Waterplane is big enough to see your level. So play around with the X Y Z scale settings and in some cases you might have to move it around to your liking. Is using box projection and main part is Intensity doesnt need to be to high start off at 0.4. Then whatever Aquas shader your using uncheck Enable reflections and delete the reflection script. Should work fine after that im using it for VR and its coming out pretty good except for the problem I stated above. This solution works better then using a cubemap as the reflection probe looks alot more accurate.

 

Complete AQUAS newbie here. I keep getting the infamous 'namespace name 'globalfog' not found' compile error on a fresh install. any idea how to fix this?

 

Hi, I'm trying to use Aquas Water over a terrain, it works fine in the Editor but on iOS breaks up into what appear to be vertical slices - getting worse as the angle to the water increases. Any idea what is causing this? Is it a depth buffer problem?

Simple example terrain - in editor:


On iOS:

 

@Dambusters yes, this is due to the limited depth buffer support on mobile devices. If and how this effect shows strongly depends on the scene setup, but I haven't found a way to remove it. See if drastically increasing the far clipping plane of the camera helps anything. For such cases I've included the opaque mobile shader. It doesn't look as good as the alpha blended one, but users for whom the alpha blended shader doesn't work could be given the option to use the opaque one instead. Sorry I have no better news on this one.

 

@dogmachris
Ah, that's a shame, I was hoping it might just be me just missing something!
Many thanks for the instant reply and for creating a great Asset.

 

For anyone that really needs to know, I've gotten around the depth-buffer issue on certain android devices with an extra camera rendering a custom depth shader to a (downsampled) render texture via shader-replacement. It's not cheap on mobile, but it's possible if it's important enough to you. The depth buffer for some androids is just pathetic and finicky.

 

We've been doing some more work in LB to provide better support for flowing rivers in AQUAS and to give many more options when creating rivers in general.



There's some information here.

 

Hi dogmachris,

just wanted to check, if you have any news regarding this matter!?

 

Ever find out what the issue was here? I didn't see any resolution in the thread. I'm getting the same error. For now, I just commented out the vignette stuff that was erroring..... I don't understand why it can't find it - it's on the camera.

It also happens in the demo scene in my project same as what you saw.

 

I never found out where the error came from, nor do I know whether @KrankyBoyGames was able to solve it or not, but I still can't make anything out of the error message, because the the line that comes up in the error is empty in the script if it hasn't been altered. Did it work before? Has anything changed before the error came up or was it spontaneous? Are all scenes affected, even when you create a new one?

 

Hi @refaxx I'm back from holidays now, currently working off the support requests that have piled up - I'll be testing for the issue this week and let you know what I've got asap.

 

When you have two or more aquas water objects are they completely independent? I.E can you have one in the scene that is an ocean with all it's settings then another object set as a river or stream with totally different settings?

 

Yes, you can. AQUAS works with waterplanes, each of which has a material on them. Each material can have different parameters making it look and behave completely different. For instance you might have a clean lake and a dirty swamp at a different position and even at a different height. The only thing that might need a workaround to actually work as intended, is if you have 2 waterplanes at different levels overlapping.

 

I'll have to create a new empty scene and see. The odd thing is, I don't get the error on other projects and it works fine. So far it only seems to be this one, so it has to be something specific to the project. I'll let you know what I find.

 

@refaxx I tried reproducing your issues with map magic. Here too deactivating the caustics reduced the draw calls drastically, but at the same time the framerate went up too. Deactivating the reflection however didn't seem to have any considerable impact.

The issue seems to be related to mm, because I usually use gaia and world creator and never had comparable issues - if you've seen the tech demo video, I covered the terrains with trees extremely densly, and performance was good enough to record it in realtime with reflections all on. Have you tried AQUAS with any terrain tool other than map magic? Do the same problem occurr?

As for the caustics, it might be related to the fact that map magic instantiates terrain tiles over the entire scene size, thus caustics might for some reason (since they're projectors) cause a draw call for each terrain tile, even though if not yet visible. I'm not sure about that, because I don't really know how mm works, so I don't wanna push the blame over to someone else, but I contacted denis (the maker of mm) to try and find out if he has any explanation for this.

 

@IFL the fact that reflections don't show correctly when using SPSR might actually be a bug in Unity rather than incorrect reflections. I've found this thread on the topic:
http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/5-4-beta15-reflection-rendering-wrong-in-openvr-htc-vive.398756/

There's also a workaround, but it can only be done on the user's side. Do you think this would help?

 

Sorry, I've been super busy so I haven't tackled SPSR yet. From the looks of it, it is indeed a Unity issue. I'll get back to you in the next week regarding the success of the fix. Thanks for the info!

 

Hi,

I'm using Unity 5.4, Build setting Apple Ios

When I import Aquas I get the above message:

If I click the first tab....I made a backup, then I get an error when it is done....

NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object
UnityStandardAssets.Utility.FPSCounter.Update () (at Assets/Standard Assets/Utility/FPSCounter.cs:34)

If I click the second option " No thanks" then it loads but it does not work properly in the editor. You cannot adjust the waves etc....

If I load Aquas with a Unity build setting of PC, it seems to work fine as long as you avoid the mobile..... which is what I need..

Any ideas?


thanks

 

@dogmachris I just imported Aquas 1.3 into my project and I cannot use it with Gaia. This is the error I am getting

"/AQUAS_LensEffects.cs(69,5):Error CS0246: The type or namespace name 'GlobalFog' could not be found. Are you missing a using directive or an assembly reference?"

 

@Jacky_Boy

1/ edit file named GlobalFog.cs

2/ update line number 9

Code (CSharp):

1. class GlobalFog : PostEffectsBase

to

Code (CSharp):

1. public class GlobalFog : PostEffectsBase

3/ save.

Does that work?

 

Interesting. Do you also have the problem with lower Unity versions? Also does it work, when your target platform isn't mobile or web?

The FPSCounter.cs isn't actually required for AQUAS to work. Does it work, if you remove it?

P.S.: When developing for mobiles, you might run into problems with namespaces not being found, however those errors come from scripts, that come as additional tools, but are not required for AQUAS to work (e.g. Screenshotter).

Does any of that help?

 

@refaxx I think I might have found a solution to your performance problem. When using mm, the default pixel error for the terrain (in the mm settings) is set to 1, which is extremely low, even for high end machines. Set it to something like 10 and see if that helps. Also when using more than 4 textures on the terrain, it adds an additional pass and a considerable amount of draw calls. I removed the 5. texture from the mm demo scene and increased the pixel error to 10. As a result I went down in draw calls from 10.000 to 2.000, with rocks and trees still enables and good performance.

Could you try that and see if it helps?

 

I love this asset package. I could use your help though. I am able to use fine within Unity 3D editor but when I publish the build to the standalone player on the same machine the water does not render completely. I can see the reflection on the bottom and the underwater effects work but I can not see the surface of the water. My guess is that the asset is not exporting all the files correctly during the build process. How do I get this to work in the standalone player.

 

Hi, @dogmachris
Thanks for great product! I've faced some issue with Aquas. When camera is high enough above the water and I press play water becomes milky color and cloud reflections got gone. I got default shader on water plane and tried to change settings with no luck. Could you tell me how can I make beautiful view of the sea from above?

 

@zinkins Do you have the checkbox "Enable Custom Fog" in the material settings ticked?

 

@jeffthewhitegoose that's weird. Do the demo scenes from the demo pack work: https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B-kgKhXGlsr1eXgtS05tNG14SVU ?

 

no

 

but Lighting tab has the Fog checkbox that got ticked when play is pressed... So I think it's not the Aquas issue. Sorry for disturbing you and thanks for right direction!

 

Hi @dogmachris! Thank yu for the great tool Is it somehow possible to make AQUAS work with the Blacksmith Atmospheris Scattering tool from Unity in Deferred mode? That would be so cool!

 

@zinkins no problem at all.
However, since you had this issue, I assume, you're working in deferred rendering mode. You can get fog to look right with that, you only need to attach the GlobalFog.cs from the standard assets to the camera. For some reason in deferred it's required for terrain objects to actually receive fog.

Cheers!

 

@paxilon I haven't tested that yet, but if I had to guess, I'd say it works only with shaders that can use the z-buffer, which AQUAS can't. It could only, if it was opaque, however I doubt you'd like the looks of it then.

 

YES IT DOES! Thanks @dogmachris

 

Finally happy owner of this amazing asset : D

 

Btw, it would be really appreciated if you could get rid of the warnings for the next update.
Warnings seems to hide other important ones and also seem slightly unprofessional : p

Im using my own water plane, so it seems like i need to scale up all tilings in the shader script with the same amount as the differens in size between the planes. Unity plane seems to be 500 times bigger than your tiny one, so i have to scale up by a factor of 500. Any thing else to think about when using a custom water plane?

 

@virror the warnings come from the reflection script for using an obsolete method. I tried using the one that was meant to replace it instead, but for some reason it flips the normals of any terrain object in the scene - however, it's only a warning and otherwise harmless.

The appropriate tiling values depend on the UV layout of the used mesh. Check this older post for more info:
http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/up...le-vr-web-desktop.378519/page-11#post-2722140

 

Yeah, but is it only the tiling thats affected or are there more things that would need to be adjusted if using another mesh?

 

No, only the UV layout must be right.

 

@dogmachris sorry for my late reply, i was on vacation myself this time i tried your suggestions and they work very nicely.

even just increasing the pixel error from 1 to 3 was enough to keep a steady framerate of 60 on my machine. i also noticed when trying some different settings, that when the AQUAS waterplane is enabled, all of the terrain looks somehow nicer. a bit darker, but more detailed. does the waterplane shader somehow influence the terrain?

 

@dogmachris - The single pass stereo rendering reflection workaround that you linked is good. Implementation isn't difficult, but it's probably project-specific (as you mentioned).

Note to anyone using an adaptive-quality system that modifies HMD resolution on-the-fly (like available in the Lab Renderer from Valve): I'm not sure if single pass rendering can work properly if the resolution of the HMD is changing at runtime. I couldn't find a quick solution. It's possibly linked to this Unity bug.

 

Recently picked up Aquas Lite as a test for a golf course design builder I'm running in Unity 5.2.3f1. Water looking great in editor and game test but on build out (windows standalone), reflections and sky seem to be absent from the water plane. I am not a developer, just an enthusiast, I am guessing I am missing something simple, any suggestions?

In game


In editor (not exact same spot so ground texture slightly different)

 

Great! Does that resolve your performance issue with AQUAS then?

 

It seems like fog is enabled in the build, but not in the editor - are you in deferred rendering mode by any chance?