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

AQUAS is actually flat for performance reasons. Even though it also works fine for calm oceans, it's best suited for lakes, rivers, ponds and pools.
AQUAS works with VR devices, except that realtime reflections don't seem to work correctly when using SPSR, as @virror pointed out.

 

Hello.

Is this the problem in the last version of AQUAS?

 

I already tried and yes, that's the reason of lag spikes on cpu, but I do not know why main issue come from small water planes and do not from the main water plane. For example, I have 4 water plane: one main water plane, two river water planes and one small lake. If I disable reflection from main lake water plane and from two rivers and leave just one water plane (small lake) issue is still here. If I disable reflection from all water plane and leave just the main lake water plane I do not have any issue. Could be a problem with multiple overlapping water planes?
However disabling details of terrain resolve issue.

 

Hi there. I recently bought AQUAS because I was in need for a lightweight but yet nice looking water solution. Water is not very important in our game but it should at least look good. AQUAS does a fantastic job and I am positively surprised. Nice work Dogmachris!
One question remains for me and maybe you have a better solution to cope with this situation. We stream our world in. Therefore I had to divide large water areas and spread them over different sectors. This works nice as long as I use standard Unity planes with the same size. But this does not work in all cases as we have sometimes tunnels. So I needed to create some custom geometry with different bounds but fitting UV's. However this always caused very visible seams. The only solution was making them share the same position origin wise. This is not a big deal at all but forces me to rework some of the geometry. Maybe you have a better solution for this.

Cheers and again: Great work!

 

Hi, I recently got a project from a friend that uses AQUAS 1.3
I've been trying to implement UNET to it & started getting errors.
The project worked fine before I started messing in it.
The moment I added a network identity to my player I started receiving the errors

Not allowed to access Renderer.material on prefab object. Use Renderer.sharedMaterial instead
UnityEngine.Renderer:get_material()
AQUAS_LensEffects:Start() (at Assets/AQUAS/Scripts/AQUAS_LensEffects.cs:120)

NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object
AQUAS_LensEffects.Start () (at Assets/AQUAS/Scripts/AQUAS_LensEffects.cs:138)

NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object
AQUAS_LensEffects.Update () (at Assets/AQUAS/Scripts/AQUAS_LensEffects.cs:409)

When I go underwater now, the bubbles are gone..
Any help would be very much appreciated.

Das

 

I don't know what's going on. I can't get this to work without loading the demo scene first then any water i make just works as expected.. seems kind of strange.

 

Does it work with single pass rendering?

 

@dogmachris
Very nice asset, it's made the final cut for my picks, will be picking it up soon.
I searched the forum post for information about any plans for waterfalls, I think this would be a really nice addition to aquas, I see you planned some time ago to work on it, has there been any progress on that front? Just looking at some final things and I'd like a few waterfalls, before I go looking into another asset for it I figure better find out if it's already coming

 

The fancy PC shaders do not work with Single Pass right now. I'm hoping dogmachris will learn what he needs to learn to get it working!

 

The key to custom meshes is the UV-stup. When you create your meshes in maya or blender or 3ds, display the UV-coordinates and see if the UV-textures repeat perfectly - if they don't the textures are bound to display visible seams.

 

Sounds like the bubble prefabs cannot be found by their path to be instantiated. Have you moved the AQUAS folder or parts of it or have you renamed the folder from AQUAS to something else?

 

That really is strange. Does this happen in any new project or only in a specific one? Also could you tell me, which Unity version you're using?

 

Hey there, thank you very much!
If I'm gonna add waterfalls, it's only gonna be particle effect based ones. The reason is, that I don't see ways to create mesh-based waterfalls, that fit individual surroundings "quick&easy". It would be so much of an effort, that it would easily make for a separate asset and go way beyond a simple feature of AQUAS.

 

Hi chris,

currently I'm looking for the right "water solution". It seems, there are no "complete" solutions on the asset store (or I do not know them). The PlayWay Water System has nice waves but AQUAS have nicer water surface and great underwater shader. Uh...

Is it possible to create waves, spray of waves, or a surf/surge on the rocks with AQUAS?

 

I need to make some effect when player walk in the water (I'm making a 3d person game) there is a way ? any hint ?

 

I could get behind that, a separate asset for waterfalls created by the water god over here, c'mon Poseidon, need our waterfalls! lol
In all seriousness, I'd probably be satisfied with a couple nice particle effects with the same quality that Aquas had, certainly save me trying 3 or 4 particle systems to find the one that's going to give me a quality humid spray/splash whatever effects for waterfalls. The meshes themselves are something we have to produce for ourselves to fit the terrain, that I'm not too worried about.
But even if you don't add some particle effects, I already assumed I'd have to find something. Maybe the other savants around here could point me to a good waterfall asset to mix with Aquas.

 

Don't take my word on this, but the short answer is no. Aquas focuses on flat water planes, but having read most of the forum, I do believe the author has some plans in the future for deforming mesh water (or perhaps just a change to the bouyancy stuff in support of artificial swells).

As for waves crashing against rocks, I suspect that'd the closest you could get right now, wouldn't look fantastic. You could use flowmaps to make the water flow quickly towards the rocks, but you'd have to figure out how to animate the crash causing the tide to flow back. And then you'd also have to include the particle effects for the wave crashing. And finally, any touches for increasing and reducing the puddle factor on those rocks for the polish (a little easier with something like megasplat).

Long story short, Aquas is beautiful flat water, great for calm oceans, lakes and flat flowing rivers. The shaders do have some noise to make the water less calm, but not quite what you're looking for (not sure what you're after is realistic in a single package, just fwiw).

 

@ dogmachris

yes, I think the foldernames got changed.. I'll try to fix them in the next few days & see if I get it working.
Thanks for the reply!

 

Surround your water with a collider marked as a trigger and then use OnTriggerEnter or OnTriggerStay functions to detect when the player is in the water.

 

Hi all, I did a test upgrade to Unity 5.6.0b8 (yes Beta I know) but I wanted to test if Aquas might still work fine. I found for the most part it did, except for Caustics which are partially projected with some 'gaps' See attached. It was working fine in Unity 5.5.2f1 and I made no changes, so I suspect something in the new Unity is different. If anyone has seen this or know a workaround let me know please.

 

@dogmachris
So I was just over in the EasyRoad3D forum, asking about the rivers component of it. And in specific, if it would be possible to combine that product to create a mesh for the river, but have aquas do the material on it. In particular, where it may follow down a mountain path or hills to/from lakes, etc.
I thought I'd mention this in case you want to take a peek either from an integrations perspective, or possibly to even consider a feature of your own for adding more dynamic rivers to Aquas.
I'd like to hear your thoughts on it, the EasyRoad3D author suggests that I'd have to talk to you about how the aquas shader would behave with it for reflections and whatnot. I admit a little bit of what he said went over my head, I'll have to dig in a bit further on this point but I thought you might be able to shed some light on the idea.

 

Just in case others run into this issue: Make sure to set 'Cast shadows' to 'off' on custom meshes used as water planes. This caused some strange flickering / artifacts when looking around at close distance.

 

I wish the vr issue with reflections will be sorted out, also the lack of Singlepass Stereo rendering compatibility is a real problem for me. I'd really want to integrate Aquas in my VR projects.

 

Any update on this issue?

 

You could do that with particle effects. AQUAS in itself doesn't have physical waves, it's actually flat for performance reasons.

 

Uhm yeah, you could do that with a particle effect. Such effects are not included in AQUAS however.

 

Well it's not exactly a waterfall, but if you want to, just drop me a PM, I could send you the particle effects, that I used for the boat wake effect in the demo video. You couls adjust it to work as a waterfall or at least use it as a starting point.

 

There is a shader problem with Single Pass Stereo Rendering that has NOTHING to do with the reflections. There is a problem as well with reflections but even when removing reflections completely (aka script AND checkbox in shader) there is still an artifact in the rendering that was perfectly shown by Migueljb in page 12 with screenshots. If you could address this problem by updating the shader it would be awesome , really THE VR water. The answer is probably easy and in here https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/SinglePassStereoRendering.html however I do not write shaders so I do not know how to proceed. However from other assets I got answer from the developers telling me what to substitute in their shaders and it was normally a line or two.

P.S: The artifact I see is a common issue with SPSR and it happens in many shaders, for example some distortion shaders I got from kripto, etc

 

This is very similar to what I see in your shader https://forum.unity3d.com/threads/s...srefraction-effect-of-effects-package.418239/ maybe the asnwer is similar?

 

After applying underwater affects, I get a blue shading everywhere. Hoping to get a little help. Also, I'm not overly knowledgeable in Unity and what not. Only been using it off and on for a couple years and mostly in the past few months. But have been writing software for 20 years.

Using Unity 5.5.1.p3
Not sure which version of Aquas I have, didn't see a version #, but I purchased and downloaded it on March/27/2017


Steps I took to get here...

• New Project
• Imported Standard Assets
• Created a new terrain using Unity terrain tools gave it a texture
• Imported the Aquas and Editor folders by dragging and dropping them in
• Manually edited the "GlobalFog" class making it public
• Ran the Aquas Quick setup.
  • Used main camera
  • Used my terrain
  • Water level at 10.

Water looked normal.
Put camera underwater, I get a blurry watery look.

Next I

• Disabled the main camera
• Added a FPSController prefab
• Changed my "main camera" to the FPSController camera.

Now, everything in the sky has a blue tint. This image is of my brown sandy terrain above water.

 

Select the UnderwaterCameraEffects object in the hirarchy. In the inspector you can adjust the fog density. The lower it is, the lighter the underwater fog will be. I wouldn't recommend turning it off completely, because it may look unnatural, but that's your call.

 

Thought about trying that too. Do you know by any chance, if there's a way to get a VR preview in the game view in the editor?

 

I'm yet trying to find out what this might be caused by. Do you use GPU tesselation by any chance (for instance with relief terrain)?

 

Not really, I don´t know how to "emulate" the VR view, but I can try whatever you want, I am trying to finish a project and can´t ship without the water : P

 

Is there any way to change the tiling of the water at runtime?

I have a flight sim I'm working on and when the player gets high above the water the tiling is very bad. Close to the water surface it looks awesome.

It would be nice to adjust the tiling (maybe other parameters?) as the height above the water changes.

Thanks

 

Hey there,

have a look at the material inspector. You should be able to use distance-based texture tiling to get a good look from up close as well as from far away. This tutorial may help you:

 

@jococo I'm sorry, I just now realised, that you're using AQUAS Lite. The lite version doesn't have distance based tiling. I've answered your question in the AQUAS Lite thread now.

 

Hi dogmachris, I went back and tried to add underwater in a different scene, but now I'm getting this error.

 

Never-mind, I fixed it. I removed all Aquas from my project and created a new Aquas water. Ensured that I attached the proper First Person Shooter object to the Aquas camera quick start. Things seem to be working fine now.

Thanks!

 

Oh! No problem I guess I should buy this asset. It would be worth it!

 

@dogmachris

Are there any plans to make a two-sided / underwater-surface shader for mobile? I'm not sure exactly what it would be like. I'm thinking foam and specularity but without the depth-based color, because that has the effect of blocking out the sky.
I'm getting good results with the mobile shader in VR, but I'm having trouble getting the underside of the water surface to look good.

 

@dogmachris

Hi,
adding a light cookie texture to the directional light causes the whole water to turn black. On other assets the light cookie works as intended. Any idea what may cause this behaviour in your shader? I'd fix it myself but time is a constraint.

 

My Aquas waterplane is clipping my trees. Originally this was not happening. I've been having some baking issues so I completely removed all Aquas from my scene, removed my FPSController. Brought in a new FPSController, recreated my aquas water. And now, I'm getting Aquas is clipping.

Any idea why this might be happening? Here is a screenshot with the game scene running.

 

Hi

I'm using Aquas in my scene, at the moment it is just a scene with a big terrain, it is an island approx. 8km x 8km big. It does have lots of trees, no grass or other details at the moment. Without an Aquas plane in the scene I have 200-300fps. But if I enable the Aquas plane (default settings just scaled up to cover the whole island, but no underwater effects) I get 30-40fps instead.

If I check the profiler it is "AQUAS_Reflection.OnWillRenderObject()" that consumes most of the frame time and dropping the fps. This must be because of the trees in the scene as If I remove those the fps is good again with Aquas enabled.

I did also try making the terrain splitted into 8 x 8 tiles and only stream the closest ones with World Streamer to keep the amount of trees and terrain loaded in the scene at any moment. This improved the fps of the scene overal but if I enable Aquas in this split/streamed scene I still get bad fps.

Is there any way to tweak it so it runs better with trees in the scene? I've tested in both Unity 5.5.0f2 and 5.6.0f3.

Specs for dev machine are:
Windows 10 64Bit
i7-7700k
32GB Ram
970GTX

 

Did Unity 5.6 just break Aquas?

Assets/Aquas/AQUAS/Scripts/AQUAS_LensEffects.cs(5,27): error CS0234: The type or namespace name `ImageEffects' does not exist in the namespace `UnityStandardAssets'. Are you missing an assembly reference?

I went into Assets/Standard Assets/Effects/ImageEffects And seen this readme.

The old image effects have been deprecated and moved to the Asset Store: https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/#!/content/83913
We recommend that you now use the new post-processing stack. You'll find it at https://www.unity3d.com/postprocessing

 

Did you re-import the Image Effects when you upgraded? I've just updated mine (without re-importing any of my Standard Assets), and they and Aquas are still working fine. I don't see the Readme file you refer to either. In any case, if the old effects are missing from your new build, you should be able to restore them using the Asset Store link you quoted, until @dogmachris gets any issues (??) with the new post-processing stack sorted out.

 

Hi Fargle

After I upgraded to 5.6 I created a brand new Unity project. Imported Aquas. Noticed that there were no assets in the Assets/Standard Assets/Effects/ImageEffects folder anymore. Just the read me.

 

Gotcha. Since I upgraded an existing project, I still had all of the Standard Assets from 5.5. It sounds like they're still available from the Asset Store if you want them, but it might be cool to check out the new post-processing stack. I'm going to try deleting the old image effects at least, and drop in the new ones. I'll let you know how it goes.

BTW, I don't know why they're directing you to GitHub when the new version is available on the Asset Store as well. Here's the direct link if you're interested: https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/83912

Edit: Just tried replacing the old individual image effects with the new unified stack, and got the following errors:

Spoiler: Unity 5.6 / Post-Processing Stack Errors

Looks like Aquas uses the old effects pretty heavily at this point, so you'll still need them in your project until it gets updated to use the new stack. Just download them from the Store using the link in the Readme in the mean time.

 

Yeah. Bad timing, we just purchased Aquas.