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

Sadly I just downloaded it for use in a VR project to be smacked with the reflection issue. That said, we are still on 5.4, so I cannot speak to 5.5.

I hope this gets fixed or I just lost some money until this gets fixed (I hope soon)

 

AQUAS Water/River Set 1.3
Unity 5.5.0f3

Hi,

I have a scene where there is a very tall cliff in front of a body of water. When there is a sunset occurring, and the sun is descending behind the cliff, the reflection of the sun light could still be seen on the surface of the water still overlaying the cliff's shadow.

Does AQUAS support shadows overlaying the surface of the water? If so, is there a setting that I am overlooking that can make the shadows on the water surface, in terms of no sunset reflection, look properly in the scenario described above?

Thanks

 

You got it right - the performance impact of the realtimg reflections strongly depend on how many objects are reflected and how detailed they are - reflections as such don't actually exist in Unity - they're only stuff that gets rendered twice to get a reflection effect, so use with caution, especially when you have a lot of detailed objects in the scene.

 

@dogmachris
I've been using AQUAS for a very long time now, and I love it. I only have one request, infinite water..[/QUOTE]

Happy to read, you love it.
AQUAS can in some way do infinite water, yet not by recreating a mesh on the fly via GPU compute. Instead what you can do, is create tiles of water and rearrange them, so that when you for instance use 3x3 tiles, the center tile is always where your camera is. AQUAS tiles can be made to be seamless. Have a look at this tutorial for more infor:

Does that help?

 

Hi @CleverNickname try disabling the reflection component on the water plane and see, if that changes anything. Also try disabling the reflection probe (child of the waterplane) to see if it could be causing it. Please let me know if any of this helps.

 

Hi @Balgam AQUAS can't interact with ambient light. If you're using tenkoku, the moon should work like a directional light. Increase the specularity value in the material settings and see if that helps. If you don't have moonlight (only ambient light), add a directional light, that subtly provides some realtime lighting for the water. You may exclude everything else from receiving that light.

Does that help?

 

@Natesal Unfortunately I can't tell you if it has been fixed in 5.5, because I don't use VR devices. It might though, because it was a Unity issue rather than an AQUAS issue and affected ALL reflections, so there's not much I can do from here.
However nobody looses money to AQUAS, so if you're bound to stay on 5.4 and can't use AQUAS the way you need to, I'll be happy to give you a full refund, just drop me a PM.

Cheers

 

AQUAS is alpha-blended, so it cannot receive shadows - specularity also cannot be obscured by other geometry. In Unity this only works with opaque shaders, however at the cost of transparency and shore foam. Shadows on alpha-blended shaders have been requested as a feature for years, unfortunately Unity hasn't yet gotten around to make it possible, I'm sorry to say.

 

Are you aware of any techniques / plugins for shadows that can work with AQUAS?

 

I've got a couple of things that are being problematic. I haven't supplied a screengrab for it, but when used with Deep Sky Haze, Aquas is not affected by the haze or fog. I've read through both manuals and searched online, but can't find anything.

Second is a more subtle thing. Using Helios, the offline renderer, to record a 2D frame or short shot, the output render looks somewhat different to the game view, in terms of Aquas - the game view looks great, the render looks OK but not as good. I am not sure what would be doing that. The top one is the game view, the bottom is a frame from Helios.

Thanks.

 

I meant to add that I use USky Pro and Deep Sky Haze - they do seem to work together, though I don't always use them together - perhaps I don't need to anyway, but I like the look

The screengrab shows the problem of Aquas not responding to fog or haze.

USky Pro is not so good on haze, so I find, so maybe I'll keep to DSH. But if there are known incompatibilities between either or both and Aquas, it would be good to know. Thanks again.

 

Answering my own mist question, but Custom Fog ... I'm fairly new to Unity and realising that reflections and mist in the way I think of it in 'regular 3D' doesn't happen the same in Unity. So I guess this Custom Fog is the answer here.

Would still like to know about the render difference though please.

 

Right the custom fog is the option to use here. The thing is that many weather systems use the z-buffer for the fog. Alpha-blended shaders such as AQUAS can't use the z-buffer, so they won't receive this kind of fog. The custom fog can be made to blend in smoothly with whatever fog system you're using.

I'm not exactly sure, where the render difference might come from, but please disable the reflection probe (child object of the waterplane) and see if it then looks in the editor like it looks in the helios render. Does it?

 

I don't know if anyone has yet managed to project shadows on alpha-blended shaders. I'm not even sure it's even possible with the current Unity versions.

 

Thanks!

 

Looking into the VR reflection issue, i stumbled upon this thread, they seem to have a shader based solution for it, not sure that it works in your case but might be worth a look?
https://forum.unity3d.com/threads/5-4-beta15-reflection-rendering-wrong-in-openvr-htc-vive.398756/

 

Very realistic look of the water! Great job!

 

As far as I see it's a reflection script with a different approach, not a shader based solution. We've had it about this earlier with @IFL - However it would be good to know if the issue has been fixed in Unity 5.5. If so, there would be no need for ugly workarounds.

 

Ok, i just saw the thread and thought it just might have some relevant information : p

 

No effect on the issue. For what it's worth, I forgot to mention in my original post that the scene is all real time lighting with nothing baked.

 

Hi guys, Is there any information on what the update brings? I can't seem to find it.

 

The current version brings only bugfixes. On the asset store page, you can click on the version number below the description to see the entire change log. The latest version is 1.3.1. The changes are as follows:

- Added an option for certain editor versions to autodisable reflections while in edit mode, as a bypass for a bug that prevents object selection in the scene view while reflections are enabled.
- Added an option to exclude reflections from occlusion culling

I haven't yet added the changes to the changelog on the forum (1st post), but will do that asap.

 

As far as i can see, its exactly the same script that you are using in Aquas, with a few comment changes?
Did you look at the files down at the bottom?

And looking at the shader, i see this:

Code (CSharp):

1. #ifndef UNITY_SINGLE_PASS_STEREO
2.                 if (unity_CameraProjection[0][2] < 0)
3.                 {
4.                     o.refl.x = (o.refl.x * 0.5f);
5.                 }
6.                 else if (unity_CameraProjection[0][2] > 0)
7.                 {
8.                     o.refl.x = (o.refl.x * 0.5f) + (o.refl.w * 0.5f);
9.                 }
10. #endif

Which looks very relevant to the issue we are having with single pass stereo?

 

I also have another question, i would like to get aquas river shader to work with Easy Roads 3d, but it seems to be something incompatible, river looks all squashed and strange, any thing i can do to make it look better? I guess its because of how the mesh is setup?

 

Apologies for the delayed response. Yes, if I disable the reflection probe, the game view and Helios render look the same, but unfortunately that extra refined look from the reflection probe is obviously now missing.

 

I'm working on a project and the majority of the action is underwater. I've run into a bit of a setback with Aquas and the cinematic image effects from this package. If I use DoF with the underwater lens distortion, the DoF and distortion don't line up. In other words, the DoF is taking place before the underwater lens distortion. The result is an offset DoF image. See the following screenshots. The second is with the focus plane debug view turned on for the cinematic effect behaviour.





I don't know anything about shader programming, but I'm hoping maybe you (or someone else) can help remedy this. The underwater scene looks so much better with the distortion, and without DoF everything is perfectly in focus and it looks bad.

 

Okay, after playing around with it for a bit, I've figured out what's happening (though I'm still not quite sure why). The UnityGI gi.indirect.specular value in the river shader is reading as 0, and that in turn is what's causing the river shader to look the way it does. Why this only happens in the standalone build and not when running from the editor I'm not sure, but I'm guessing it's a Unity bug that's causing it to send the wrong value to the shader. If I remove all reflection probes from my scene, the problem goes away in the standalone build, but obviously my visual quality suffers in turn. I'm not using any baked lighting or precomputer realtime GI. Anyone have any idea why this might be happening and how to fix it without having to drop reflection probes entirely?

EDIT

Nevermind, I figured out what was happening. One of my reflection probes (before I disabled it), was accidentally set to refresh on awake rather than refresh every frame, and I'm guessing that it was taking its render snapshot after the lighting got initialized when running from the editor, but before the lighting got setup in the standalone build due to some or other difference in loading. Therefore, it was feeding in data to the shader that there was no GI indirect specular lighting, which threw everything off; and when it was disabled, Unity defaulted to getting that value however it does when no reflection probes are present. I fixed the reflection probe and the issue in the standalone went away (though reflections still look weird in VR as of 5.5).

 

This is a very cool asset, and I'm really digging the customizability of it!

I'm curious if there's a way to make the waves higher (or choppier, I guess)? I can make them faster but I haven't worked out if I can make them "bigger" (increase the difference between trough and crest).

EDIT: Also, are caustics only painted on terrain, or also on objects that are underwater?

Thanks!

 

Hi there,

Love the asset. It's making my dreams of making a realistic-looking walking simulator come true.

Question: I'm trying to add bouyancy to the Unity Standard Assets FPS controller, and it doesn't seem to work. The character just falls into the water and sinks to the bottom, no matter what settings I use on the bouyancy script. Can you help? I'm using the script included in Aquas rather than a dedicated asset because I don't need complex bouyancy stuff, just the basics.

Thanks!

 

Hi, We are encountering a weird behavior.

Currently the AQUAS surface renders perfectly in the Game View (and in game), but in the Scene view, it renders _behind_ the terrain. Even if the terrain Y is 0, and I raise the water plane to Y 10.. the Water still doesn't render in the scene.

This happens some times.. and some other times it renders fine in the Scene view.

Any idea how to fix this?

Thanks!

 

Hi - is anyone using Helios, the offline camera/renderer, successfully with Aquas underwater using the 360 camera? There are at least two of us trying to get consistent results, but finding that either the terrain doesn't render, or the fog doesn't, or no output at all - it's a mixed bag of problems. This is for recording 360VR movies. We suspect it's the extensive post effects stack for the underwater effects - at least one of the Unity cinematic effects caused black frames in Helios output, and I see from the docs that those are partly used in the underwater stack. I'd appreciate any advice and experiences please as this is turning into a major head banger

 

I am using Aquas with Helios and getting a similar issue with underwater. I am trying to capture stereoscopic 360 underwater. Helios is capturing everything. But when underwater, I can't capture terrain or plane. This only happens when I am underwater. All other objects (cubes and models) are being captured. I also tried exporting terrain to .obj then re importing it after converting to .fbx, but no luck. I am getting the same results.

 

That's the UV-layout of the mesh. The UV layout is decisive if you want to make custom meshes. Here's some more info on that from an older post>>

 

Sorry for the delayed reply. I've contacted John Rossitter the maker of Helios about this, since I'm not sure, AQUAS is causing this or not.

 

This might be due to the fact, that the distortion is not caused by an image effect but rather by a material on a plane right in front of the camera, which serves as a "lens" object. The thing is, that the DoF affects that plane too, if you have it take effect too close to the camera. Does it work for you if you have it start further away - just slightly?

 

Thanks for letting me know - appreciate that.

 

Not really, I'm afraid. AQUAS doesn't actually produce physical waves, it's all just surface effects. You can make the waves seem more defined, but they won't actually become higher.
The caustics are painted by projectors, so by default they should be painted on all objects, that can receive from a projector.

 

Thank you.
The thing with the buoyancy is, that it works based on a mesh. Your first person character doesn't have one, I suppose. Add a mesh object of your choice (preferrably one that makes the character behave as much the way you want, as possible) and turn the component invisible in the inspector.
BEWARE however, this might heavily conflict with your character controls. Are you sure, you're not looking for a swimming system instead?

 

Is your camera orthographic?

 

@LazyMonster Have you tried turning off the image effects one by one to see which one might be causing it?

 

@dogmachris, That was it.

My camera is not isometric..... but the Scene view was set to Iso, switched to Perspective, and it works as expected.

Thanks!

 

Hey guys, So i've been trying to find the reason my scene jumps in framerate and batches and i've found it to be the primary and secondary caustic projectors. Both adding 3000+ calls each. By removing the orthograpic tickbox they go down but i just wondered what effects this is going to have?

Spent days trying everything, convinced it was the trees or grass or terrain only to find it is the water (probably reflecting said details) as i was getting double positive results from removing. Hair well and truly pulled out.....

 

@AndyNeoman the amount of draw calls depends on the amount of objects that receive projection- each produces an additional draw call. Do you have objects inside the water that receive from the caustics projectors? If so, you might want to move them to a different layer and exclude that layer in the projector's culling mask.
When you have the projector set to orthographic it will project on everything below it, but when unchecking that tickbox, it behaves like a perspective camera with a FOV- this can work, but it might also lead to undesired effects, such as parts of your scene that are further away from the projector not receiving from it.

 

Thanks @dogmachris,

It is all the foilage and trees I have. Game is based in a dense jungle environment.

I will try putting them on a layer and excluding - although i do want some to effect it.

There is no foliage in the water though, only on the terrain although the water is underneath and covers the whole terrain as I found four separate water objects for the edges was less efficient.

 

Here is another scene showing a river created with AQUAS and Landscape Builder. The AQUAS Double-sided River shader is applied to the river mesh that is created in LB.



In code, it would be pretty easy to lerp the River material Main Color and Deep Water Color as the sun sets or rises using the values from LB Lighting.

Assets used:

AQUAS, Landscape Builder, Rustic Grass, Nature Pack, 3DForge Exteriors

 

Pretty sure this has been answered before but I cant find it. The water gets rendered before my low LOD version of my trees. It has todo with render Que I think but where or how do i fix this?

 

Nice, so do I get it right, that LB can create a river mesh with proper UV setup?

 

See this post. Is that what you're looking for?

 

Yes, LB sets the UVs up for the river mesh to work with AQUAS. And you can modify the UV Tiling should you need to when creating or modifying the river surface. The scene above also uses LB to modify the topography (terrains) for the river bed.

If you have a variable width river, the UVs will be correctly applied to the mesh so that the AQUAS shader gets the correct data.

 

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